I know we live in the world of instant gratification... We believe that everything should happen yesterday, and that magical ridiculous crazy body transformation results are possible in as little as three days, or 7 days, or two minutes a day! We've been hyped up on instant results to the point where I think we expect miracles every time we try a program.
The tough reality is that our body is a complex machine. It is absolutely possible to make it amazing changes, but you have to give all the systems time to adapt and adjust. Can you see impressive results in a week? Sometimes! Especially depending on how much you change and what you're specifically working towards. But I think sometimes we set ourselves up for failure and we expect the miraculous to happen with minimal changes and not taking into account how long we've been going in a different direction.
Patience is a challenging thing. It's so easy to get discouraged when we work out for one day, and the scale the next day doesn't reflect any change! Don't laugh, you know you've done that, too! We somehow have forgotten that so many of our body's systems are interrelated, and the instant results aren't exactly how things happen. We can accept that we're not going to gain 10 pounds overnight, but we somehow can't accept that we can't lose them overnight!
That's a little silly when you think about it. So for everyone considering starting a program or even in the middle of the program: have a little patience with yourself. I think one of the best ways to approach this is to reflect more on the habit you're committed to and on the lifestyle your building. A great quote I like to remind clients of is “we are what we repeatedly do.”
So therefore if we repeatedly live the way a healthy, vibrant, energetic person would live, our body will adjust to become a healthy vibrant energetic person! It will not happen tomorrow. But you also didn't get to where you are today overnight. It takes at least as long if not longer to go back the other direction towards optimal health and fitness. Bad habits are easy to create and harder break. But have a little patience, focus on the activity and the things you CAN control. You cannot control the results, but you can control all of your actions and what you're doing to live better, to be healthier, and help your body achieve the changes that you want to see happen.
Have patience, focus on what you can control. The rest will work itself out in the end!
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