What I learnt from my past New Year Resolution Failures – The Mental Well-Being Coach
On this day in January 2015 i declared that I was going to get back in to my wedding dress by that summer.
Spoiler Alert 🚨
It didn’t happen!
I think we’ve all been here all too often. Feeling like we should be making an effort to be fitter / happier / more productive but not really knowing how or even why sometimes.
This resolution was wishful thinking. I remember feeling so low about my appearance. My weight was going up and up, I was having to cover my hair to stop me doing more damage with my hair pulling disorder and I just wanted to hide away. I wanted a magic wand to be waved and for me to somehow go back to a previous version of me.
So why did I not take action? Why did I not change my eating, drinking, start exercising … I mean that’s HOW you lose weight, just the simple math of calories in calories out, so why did it not happen?
It didn’t happen because I hated myself. I hated what I looked like. I hated my body. I hated my thinning hair and self destructive habits. I hated my blotchy skin. I hated that I couldn’t eat what I wanted and lose weight. I hated how alcohol made me feel but I needed it to get through the discomfort I was feeling in so many areas of my life. Life wasn’t fair. I wanted an easy and quick fix. So yeah, it didn’t happen.
Why did I hold out hope for an easy fix? Because I thought change would be too hard. I thought building healthy habits would mean giving up what little joy I had in life. What I wasn’t factoring in was the fact that the way I was living was already hard on me mentally and physically!
It wasn’t until 2017 that I first started to see how I was going to get to where I wanted to be. I realised that what I was going through already was hard. Over eating and over drinking was my lifestyle and that was causing me the pain of looking in the mirror and hating what I saw. The other alternative was to swap some of the the over eating / drinking for 30 mins or an hour in the gym a few times a week and then looking in the mirror and seeing someone who was still not satisfied but someone who trying!
It seemed like a fair exchange and worth giving it a try. So I cut out some of the takeaways and reassessed my portion sizes a bit and tried a few spin classes, and I remember starting to look on the mirror after these classes when I was bright red in the face but feeling alive and thinking, “I’m doing it”.
It took me a year of doing that before I realised that I felt ready take things further. I signed up for a 12 week fitness challenge at my local gym, something I had thought was way too extreme for me just a year earlier. I simply promised myself that I’d turn up to the prescribed number of sessions and see what happened.
To my great surprise I found myself following through with that promise.
For me the trick was to make the right promises. I didn’t promise myself I would lose 3 stone in 5 months like I had in my 2017 New Years resolution. I simply promised to show up for myself. I wanted to look in the mirror and give myself that pat on the back for “doing it”.
The results just kept coming. The stones fell away. I ended up voluntarily giving up alcohol because of how good I felt, and I found myself with a whole new way of living with myself and it didn’t suck! In 2019 I fit in to my wedding dress from 2006. I had forgotten that it was even a goal but I found my dress while trying on some other things I had forgotten I had in my wardrobe. I might have taken a lot longer to get there, but I’d done it the right way.
My biggest take aways, that I hope I can pass on are these:
- If you’re suffering now, the pain of making a few changes won’t mean you’ll be suffering more, and the results will hopefully alleviate suffering in the long run.
- You can do hard things, and you can celebrate your wins all the way! I still thank myself every-time I do a thing I didn’t want to do, knowing that I’m banking some good stuff for future Helen.
- The aim should be to love yourself more, not to hate yourself less!
