I believe you must consider appropriate motivation when talking about a sustainable plan for change, and you really have to look to the internal, rather than the external. Things will be hard, time will be short, the weather will be bad, people will be unsupportive, etc. What will keep you moving when everything else encourages you to inaction?

Beyond all the noise of daily living, I have to focus on my “why.” Why am I doing this? What is motivating me to try to make changes that last this time? How will this be different from all the other times? The truth is, I don’t know if it will be. But I have to try.

There’s different levels of “why,” of course, from the superficial to the ones so deep in the psyche that they’re painful to chip it. In my case, I don’t want to say that it’s to be thin or to be hot. Those come too close to making changes for other people, not me, and I don’t trust my body to fit so neatly in those parameters anyway. I haven’t been thin since I was a preteen, and I may or may not already be hot. That’s kind of an eye of the beholder thing.

But I think I want to be “more” than I am now. I want to be stronger and have more stamina. Speed doesn’t matter to me that much, and I’m fairly flexible as I am. (That one tends to surprise people. No one expects the big girl to be bendy. Oh, the gymnast I might have been with a bit of training.) I want to be healthier and more confident and able to do things that I can’t (or can’t do well) right now.

So my “whys” at this moment include:

Better Health
I am now in my mid-30s, with future health problems skipping up the sidewalk to knock on my door. I have high cholesterol, which is genetic, and per my cardiologist requires me to be on medication the rest of my life, regardless of diet or exercise. I can resign myself to that, because my un-medicated 5 and 10-year heart attack risk charts were super fun to look at. I cried in the doctor’s office; don’t really want to do that again. However, there’s a host of other health problems I can ward off through lifestyle changes. Most of my immediate family is diabetic; don’t really want to do that either. Additionally, with the recent changes to the ACC/AHA blood pressure guidelines, I am perilously close to a high blood pressure diagnosis if nothing changes.

Better Mood
As I said in the last post, I default to self-loathing. It’s interesting looking back at my classmates in my counseling program and recognizing how many of us have struggled with depression, anxiety, and/or an eating disorder at one point or another. Exercise makes me feel good, makes me more confident, and so does developing more appropriate eating habits. I’m working on avoiding emotional eating or eating when I’m bored.

More Endurance
I’ve mentioned before that attempting to keep up with kids on a playground served as a mental turning point for me. I contrast that experience to hanging and swinging across jungle gyms myself when I was a kid, and dancing for hours when I was in my teens and 20s and still hanging or swinging from poles or streetlights for the sheer joy and exhilaration of the movement (also, to prove that I could, because no one ever expected it of me). The entire world was a dance floor and, my friends, shorty got low. I want to dance again with reckless abandon and have my body be able to do the things I want it to do.

Clearer Sense of Self
I want to feel connected to my body and fully inhabit myself. I want to reduce the skewed perception I have about my appearance. I remember once looking at some high school pictures that I had not taken — and thus not committed to memory through bouts of nostalgia — and asking my friend who “that one girl” was. Well, it was me. I didn’t even recognize myself. That’s not what my mental image of myself at that time had been. Recently, even now, sometimes I see a stranger in the mirror or in photographs.

Author: The Cinnamon Fairy

I'm in my 30s and not quite sure how that happened. Somewhere along the way I managed to pick up degrees in Psychology and Counseling, and I am happily employed in higher education. I love animals, especially dogs and cats, and I hoard books worse than any jealous dragon with its gold and jewels. I used to dabble in several of the creative arts (fiction, poetry, drawing, painting), and I'd like to get back into that. This blog is my first major foray back into recreational writing and procrastinating.