I’m going to go against the grain a bit on “Motivation Monday”. Motivation Monday, a common motivational approach to getting people to get into a habit of working out, eating healthier, or in general to break bad trends. Like a New Years resolution, I feel with many people, Motivation Monday is almost like a fad start to something, which is why you hear about so many people falling off their resolution band wagons. If you focus on a start of a week approach, you’ve compartmentalized your focus to a week, and may find yourself fighting to stay on track for the rest of the week. It can become cyclical, every Monday picking yourself up for the previous week where you slid a bit.

Try looking at your overall health and nutritional goals as a life experience, not bound by a calendar, or a scale, or any other mental restriction. Being healthy is something you should strive for everyday, for life (thus the term Healthy Lifestyle). Dedicating yourself to anything, whether it be your health, or your work, or anything else, requires some tough mental work to be successful. The key is to continue to train yourself mentally with your approach, until that magical moment in time when whatever you are working at flips from being a chore to being a regular part of your daily routine. It took me over 5 years of continually working at this approach with regards to my health, but it’s been now 20 years where exercising (and more recently smart nutrition) has become something I barely have to think about anymore. It’s almost as if I’m on auto pilot, and that’s because I understood that the healthy lifestyle has no end point (well, until the ultimate end point of my life). I will sound repetitive, but my mantra is if you live the healthy lifestyle, your body will follow.

If you’re looking for motivation and inspiration to get yourself out of a rut, or to lose some weight, or just to generally feel better, try to look at the bigger picture. Sit back and take a more patient approach, and begin to piece together your healthy lifestyle one day at a time. Don’t be discouraged if a date on a calendar passes and you didn’t reach a weight you set for yourself (that’s just a number). The key is to be able to look in the rear view mirror and see that you continue to push yourself each day to exercise and eat healthy. There will be blips. Your chart of progress will probably look like the stock market (ups and downs), but over a length of time as long as the trend is up, that’s all that really matters.