Excuses

I was thinking today about excuses that people make (including myself). Excuses to not exercise, excuses to not watch what I'm eating, excuses to not pursue dreams. Excuses come in many forms - everything from jobs, to kids, to not having energy. Part of excuses for me personally is to hide from others. Typically, I'm not one to share a lot of personal information with people. I tend to give superficial information so that it seems as though I'm providing others a glimpse into my life, but without details no one has the opportunity to get too close or to potentially bring me harm. I've become quite good at it over the course of my life, and it never ceases to amaze me how people think they know me, when in fact they know very little about my life (or at least, nothing of significance). I do this quite intentionally. I have learned in adulthood that people aren't the way we were as kids. They don't just show up one day out of nowhere and become your friend. They don't love unconditionally. They don't really care about me or what's happening in my life. I don't mean that to sound like a giant pity party, but more so that it's just a reality of being an adult. We have other things that occupy our time - friends we've had since childhood, perhaps children and their activities, spouses, occupations, hobbies, and so on. Why would we want to bring new people into our circle?

*Image from Pinterest

But, back to excuses... Before I started this journey, I used to say that there was no hope of me losing weight - that I'm genetically predisposed to be fat, so why bother doing anything about it? Even given the fact that my entire family is overweight/obese, I don't think this is an excuse to not be healthy. Sure, I will never be a person who is tiny, but it doesn't mean that I can't be the healthiest person I can be. I find myself becoming very angry when I don't lose weight, and I think part of that is because I know how hard I work every day to see it come off, and it doesn't seem "fair" that while I can easily gain 10 pounds in a week, it will take about 4-10 weeks to get that same 10 pounds off of my body. Working out 2-3 hours a day, 5-6 days a week, it becomes aggravating to not have steady progress. Regardless though, it is progress. It might be slow - but it's progress nonetheless. I know my body pretty well, and I know that weight loss, if done correctly, is always slow for me. Slowness is also not an excuse to give up.

It would be easy to go on with the number of excuses available to use, but the reality is that as the saying goes, if you always do what you've always done, then you'll always get what you've always got. I am not willing to accept what the past has brought into my life, and the only way to fix that is to change what I have done while moving forward.