In this week’s article, we will discuss 3 things that may be having us ask the question “Why is this wellness journey so hard”.

Accomplishing our goals along the journey of wellness; people can find it to be very difficult. I have found in my experience there are 3 major factors that play a role in this difficulty.

Dwayne The Rock Johnson is a very public version of this type of transformation struggle. As he begin to change his career from the WWE and move towards a Hollywood role he needed to make some changes to his physical appearance. During wrestling, he didn’t need to be super shredded, he focused on athletic ability and acting. As he began to seek roles in Hollywood he found they wanted him to be more toned and defined and lean but very muscular. He had to make some major changes and the first thing he changed was his habits to accomplish this major change in his life. If he didn’t make this change he would never be able to accomplish the things in life he wanted to do. He would be stuck where he was and he needed to make these changes to move to the next level… A lot of us are stuck and need to make major changes so we can move to the next level of life as well.

Habits are the first thing that makes things very difficult for us in this wellness journey. You may see a common thing in these recent articles because our habits play that big of a role in our ability to change our lives. The things that we have done for the last 30 years, the people we have been around, the way we cope with stress with food or alcohol or sex, all of these are ways we can manage stress. We will at times hide our stress eating under mental hunger, or say “I’m tired and need a snack for energy” We even have to be mindful of the people around us because they can see we are having a bad day and bring us food to cheer us up which perpetuates the negative cycle of using food for coping with stress. In order to change our habits we must adjust the identity we hold so close and dearly to and allow it to change. We have to stop always trying to be right. As my counselor taught me years ago during therapy, “We need to stop knowing things we don’t know” which basically means we need to unlearn and relearn a new way of thinking and processing to change at our core who we are.

Spreading yourself too thin is a common phrase for when we attempt to do too many things at once and never focus and finish one task we desire to complete. Imagine you look in the mirror one day and you don’t see the person you know deep inside you want to be. You decide you are going to start dieting, going to the gym, reading self-help books, fasting on the weekends, and quitting smoking all at the same time. Each of these on their own are amazing things to focus on and can make a huge change in our lives, but they all take a large amount of motivation and discipline to achieve. Doing them all at the same time doesn’t provide you with the physical resources to accomplish each task properly and we probably struggle with proper coping skills with stress so we end up quitting, feeling bad for ourselves, and comforting ourselves with our favorite Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. Focus on being consistent with one major task at a time.

Dishonesty with ourselves will put us in a place where we live in a loop of failure. When we continue to tell ourselves the deep reason as to why we are doing our process and we say “It’s for health” and that’s not the deep truth, it can lead us to struggle to find motivation. I commonly tell members of the AHA community that when I first began my journey I wanted to get revenge on my ex-wife for abusing me. I felt like I got my revenge and it wasn’t as sweet as I thought. I lost a lot of motivation. I then realized my next deep why was that I wanted to find women and no longer be the fat friend that I always was. After more fasting weight loss I began to get the attention of women and realized It’s not what I truly wanted. In my life now my deepest motivation is to be on a beach in just a pair of 4-inch inseam shorts and feel confident and sexy. On the surface this sounds “Simple” but for me, it is not. It means I need to be at a certain level of muscular size, I need to love myself enough to show my body, it means I need my quads to be muscular, and it means I need to work on my self-image. It's A LOT. When I accomplish this, my why will continue to change. My health is important, but the true deep driving factor is more about other things I want from life. the good thing is that by focusing on those items my health automatically gets in a better place just by focusing on not lying to myself and what I truly want. The things I tell myself at 11 pm in the darkness of my room alone. These are the items that truly drive me.

Wellness Challenge of the Week

Take a moment to sit and think about the things you want to accomplish on your wellness journey, do you find that sometimes it can be really hard? If so take out a pen and paper and then write down habits that may be hurting your progress. Write down what are all the different activities you are doing to work on your goals and see if you are spreading yourself too thin or lacking drive in a particular activity. Finally, ask yourself is what you want TRULY what you want from this journey? No one will ever see this except you and the best thing you can do for yourself is to be as honest as possible about what you are working to achieve.