“I workout, I eat healthy yet I’m not getting Results”, I hear it constantly. It doesn’t matter what your goal is. Whether you want to lose weight or gain a booty, we have ALL said that phrase or something similar at one point in our journey. Here are the top 5 reasons why you most likely aren’t seeing any fitness related results.
Doing it for the wrong reasons.
This one hurts to hear. A lot of the time people want to change their physical appearance because of someone else. “If I’m skinner, he’ll like me” “If I have bigger booty, he’ll notice me”, “If I have a flat tummy, I’ll be prettier”…. GIRL FRIEND NO. Never ever change because of someone else. You may have motivation for a bit, but you’ll only change because YOU want it for yourself, not because you’re hoping someone else will notice/care. This is a very personal thing and having someone else as a key factor as to why you’re starting your fitness journey is not gonna work.
Fitness comes from a place of negativity
You treat fitness as a consequence. If you are exercising because you need to out burn all the junk food and treats you ate earlier in the day, results will never come. First off, you can’t out train a poor diet. Treats like cake and cookies are very calorie dense for small portions, and let’s face it… who ever eats the serving size?? You think i’m going to eat 3 Chips Ahoy cookies? HAHA ok sure, I’m really going to eat 6 and that’s ok.
Trying to get fitness results (usually focused on weight loss) does not happen if you are doing it out of spite. For years I hated my body. I could not tell you one positive thing about it. All I wanted was to lose weight, and it never happened. OR I would lose a few pounds and be excited and give up a month or so later. I was never consistent. The real change in my body, the fat loss, the muscle gain… all came when I started to love myself. Now? I am not quite where I want to be, but I can list a whole bunch of things I love about myself.
Change comes from love, not punishment. In addition to this, stop comparing yourself. You are the only you in this world. You will not look like sally, becky and karen and you should be excited about that. Find people who inspire you, but do not set your intention to look exactly like them. It will not happen, you are not them, you do not have the same genetic make up as them.
You aren’t doing what you love
If you hate the type of exercises you are doing, you aren’t going to put 100% effort into doing them. Or you simply won’t do it. No Bueno. Fitness is a very personal thing. How one person exercises will not work for everyone. There are multiple different reasons for that, one being the style of training the person prefers and differences in genetic makeup, like I mentioned above. I know that my favorite types of exercise comes and goes.
Right now I am loving HIIT and pilates style workouts because that’s what I have been doing the last 8 weeks while stuck at home. Overall though, I would say my favorite workouts are barre, spin and yoga. Each becoming the #1 favorite every so often. Because I only do workouts I enjoy, I am able to do them consistently. I look forward to them and on days where i don’t want to workout, I know they will make me feel good when I’m done. If I only did cross fit (which I actually haven’t tried but can tell from research that it is just not my style of exercise) I would never do it. You could not pay me to go. Find something you love to do. There are so many different types of workouts out there, try them all and pick the one you enjoy the most.
The food you eat
Also a sad one. A very sad one. We have got to be honest with ourselves. If I do nothing but eat pizza, ice cream and cookies, I will never see those abs I want. I have to eat some veggies. Now eating whole foods can be exciting! When I eat whole foods I feel great and energized and they really give my body the fuel it needs to live every day life and have good workouts.
Personally, I can definitely see and feel a difference when I eat more balanced. I am not saying to never eat processed foods…. last week I had fast food twice and it was great (In-n-out, Cane’s… I love you). This week though, I have had more balanced meals with lots of veggies, proteins and fruit. Your diet (i’m not talking about a fad where you lose all this weight, i mean legit the food you eat as a whole) ebbs and flows. Some days we’re eating all whole foods and feeling on top of the world and the next we had 15 cookies. It’s all ok. I don’t believe in giving up foods, I believe in eating more foods with nutritional value and less fun foods (that 80-20 life, ya know?)
Tunnel vision… to the scale
Oh the scale. The object that held so much power over me for so long. I have been working on getting away from it these last 8 weeks and I am so happy with how far I have come. I do not think scales are bad, I feel they can actually be quite helpful in your fitness journey. But they should not be the end all be all.
Let’s rewind to a year and a half ago. I was 109 pounds when I left for my junior year of college. I still felt that i had a few pounds to go but was pretty content (looking back at photos i looked too skinny and underweight). Well I had the time of my life and gained 15 pounds that year. 5 pounds were muscle and 10 were fat. So that summer I focused on becoming 114 (my previous weight plus the new 5 pounds of muscle). I lost most of the weight, but even then I was still so focused on getting to that 114 weight. With quarantine, I had nothing better than to fixate on that scale number, and it became an unhealthy obsession.
Within the last 8 weeks, I have changed my mindset to focus on how I look and feel. I feel stronger, I feel like I’m starting to notice changes in my body and could care less what the scale says. I got detached from that number and started to see results. No more feeling defeated if I lost .4 a pound that week. I don’t know anymore how much I lost in a week, all I know is I can do more jump squats, I have more definition in my arms and that is all that matters.
If you do not think you can or are ready to completely detach from the scale, that is ok. I highly recommend getting one that shares body fat, muscle and water percentage. This will help you focus on fat loss and muscle gain. That way if the number goes up you know you gained muscle, and won’t feel defeated that the number being shown is actually higher than before. The scale does not define you, how you feel does.
With love,
Em
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