Acceptance: The devil is in the details

2019 is coming to a close, and as is the case everywhere, the gyms are going to be packed starting the first working day of 2020. New year resolutions, fitness, health, what have you, will all come to the fore and will be on full display in the early part of 2020. But then, in a month or so, for most people, life would take over, and their motivation to become healthy would become something of a resolve that just got pushed to the background sometime around those first few weeks of 2020.

Some of those people will accept this as a regular part of their life, and move on with the year. Some others would look to the internet to find ways they can accept themselves the way they are. A casual stroll through the hallways of Instagram, if browsed properly, would make anyone fall in love with themselves. Social media on the whole is an interesting beast: you can go through instagram for a while, and it would make you feel like everyone else is so much better than you, and you need to get your ass to the gym and start working out 24/7. OR, you can come off feeling like you are perfect the way you are, and all you need to do is love yourself, and everything will be wonderful. There will be rainbows in the sky, and unicorns would be brining you fresh made coffee in your bed every morning.

Don’t get me wrong; acceptance is a very important thing, and accepting the way you are is a cornerstone of a happy life. But as with almost everything else in life, the details matter, and they matter a lot! It’s a great thing to accept the things in life that you can’t change: it’ll potentially reduce a lot of stress, and make you feel happier. But accepting the things that you can change? Well, not so much, and this is where this whole issue of acceptance comes up.  Allow me to explain:

You are really motivated to start 2020 on a high note. You have got your gym membership in order, and you have just bought yourself a brand new organizer. You even went and bought that fancy bacon alarm that wakes you up every morning with the smell of bacon. You also made a trip to Lululemon Athletica and dropped like $500 on some absolutely SICK new workout gear. The twenty pounds that you have been wanting to lose for like five years are finally coming off, come hell or high water!

2020 starts, and you are going to the gym, waking up at 6:43am on the dot every single day, logging your food intake, and doing everything right. It’s January 16, and the scale is showing that you are THREE pounds lighter! In your mind, it’s three down, seventeen to go. Who needs carbs when you can fit into your freshman year clothes?! Fast forward a couple more weeks:  things are getting a bit more stressful at work because two people from accounting left, and now HR has to put in some extra hours to make up for the lost manpower. And if that wasn’t enough, your best friend just went through a devastating breakup and she has had to move out. You have invited her to stay over at your place for a few days because you are a good friend, and you want to be there when she needs you the most. In these stressful times, you are obviously not going to make chicken breast and broccoli for her, so you go grocery shopping, and bring home some tasty treats and carbs and fats and all those good things that you have been avoiding. Obviously, it won’t look good if you make pasta primavera for your friend, but eat broccoli and chicken breast yourself. She doesn’t need that stress of knowing that while she goes through hell, you are out here feasting on chicken breast and broccoli and getting better. So, yada yada yada, a couple of weeks later, the three pounds have come back with some change, your motivation to hit the gym has dwindled significantly and what was boiling before has now been brought to a slow simmer. You are obviously not happy about it, but over the last few weeks, you have followed some many motivational instagram pages that tell you to accept yourself the way you are, and you aren’t feeling so bad about it. I mean, what’s a few extra pounds anyway? 2018 is turning out to be a year just like the years past, and that’s okay. Right?

The truth is, you hate yourself. All those motivational posts and memes and quotes make you feel better about yourself momentarily, but deep down inside, you know that you aren’t happy with the status quo. You really want to make that change:  you go at it hard for a while, and then life happens, and you are back to square one. There is this constant struggle within yourself where you want to accept the way you are, but you also want to change literally everything about yourself. It’s eating at you, and killing you inside. I can go on and on with more details, but that’s not really the point. The point is: how do you fix it?

There is a famous quote mis-attributed to Einstein that goes something like this: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Even though Einstein didn’t say this, but the point still stands. Normally, your past life has all the clues you are ever going to need to solve the puzzle of why you haven’t been able to break out of the status quo. Every year, it’s the same story, and every year, you have been trying to address those issues with the same approach. Unsurprisingly, every year you have the same results, or shall we say, same “lack of results”? So, what can you do?

The first thing to realize is that if making all those new years resolutions and hitting Planet Fitness like a tsunami on steroids was a successful formula, most people would be walking around the streets fit as a fiddle! Newsflash: they are not. So, don’t rush to Planet Fitness, or any other place where people gather like herds, revel in their mutual incompetence for a while, and then go home to their miserable after the first few weeks of the new year are over. If you want to change the way you look and feel in terms of health, join a real gym, with real people. The new gym membership you just bought for $9.99/month isn’t a gateway to change: it’s an illusion, that’ll let you think you are on your way to the change that you have been craving all your life, but in reality, it’s a band-aid to cover the scar that won’t heal itself. With that gym membership, no one at that gym either cares or is invested in the way your approach your goals. They have got your money, they have more than likely got you to sign a contract, and now, they don’t give a fuck.

Most people balk at the idea of paying a decent amount of money for a gym membership, and for those people, it’s fine to go to a $9.99 gym and stay the same. YOU, on the other hand, are sick and tired of being in this rut, and you want to make a real change. So, for you, it would make sense to go and shop around, and find a gym where the people are invested in your well-being, your growth, and in ensuring that you are always making progress towards your goals. If you miss a session, they’ll get in touch with you and ask you if everything is okay. If you go on a binge and gain those five pounds that you have worked so hard to lose, those people will be there and guide you towards making lifestyle changes that eliminate or greatly reduce such episodes. If you are dealing with stress in other areas of your life, those people will be there to make all the necessary modifications to make sure that despite all that is going in your life, you are still progressing towards your goals. When you find a gym with people like that, hold on to it like grim death! You will no longer be browsing instagram and facebook looking for an excuse to except all the misery in your life and feel comfortable knowing that a lot of other people are dong the same. No, that’s not what YOU want. You want to get better, and you want to be able to look back at your life and see the successes you have achieved, and not the concessions that you have had to make.

If that sounds familiar, and if that’s YOU, you better come check out the Dirty Gym in Dayton, OH. If you don’t like everything about it, I’ll personally come and apologize to you for making you read this long ass post, but I have a feeling this isn’t going to happen, and you are going to LOVE training at the Dirty Gym. And if you don’t live close, that’s no problem at all. While there is no substitute for training at the Dirty Gym, hire someone from the very capable staff at the DG as an online trainer, and they would never let you feel that you are alone, or that you have no support when the going gets tough. Whether you are train at the DG in person, or as an online client, we’ll make sure that you are taken care of and we’ll ensure a continued progress towards your goals.

So, ask yourself: Is 2020 going to be the year when you make a REAL change, and see REAL results?