Eat To Perform Blog

It's Okay to Change Your WHY!

I was reading an article from a RETIRED professional athlete the other day.

She was discussing how an injury sidelined her for quite some time and because of that she spiraled out of control.

In the post she was back at it for about a month and she talked about how she needed to remember her “why”.

If you don’t know what your “why” is, it's the deeper purpose to your life that pushes you to accomplish something that you wouldn’t without that understanding.

The problem is that some people’s “why” needs to change from time to time.

As an example, if you are a highly paid athlete you often have the incentives in place to push you. All those celebrity diets? They are a lot easier to maintain when 20 million dollars is on the line.

Said simply, when your incentives change you might need to re-examine your “why”.

I know for myself this was a hard pivot to make. As I crept closer and closer to amazing goals related to what I was accomplishing and to a certain extent body composition. My “why” got a little cloudy.

When I started it was about health, then I started chasing optimal body composition, often at the cost of mental health and performance.

Things that are important to my REAL “why” were diminishing. As an example, my personal relationships were suffering.

I’m not sure everyone is aware that the more lean you get restricting food or over doing exercise that it costs you libido. At the time I didn’t think much of it but that is the kind of thing that chips away at foundational stuff that really matters.

A big part of who you are shouldn’t be working out to quiet the “voices in your head” (I use therapy for that).

Working out is a privilege, if you have to watch FIVE motivation videos to get out of bed there is no “why” that will keep you going.

That’s the conversation here, EXPECT to reach your goals, what will happen once you do?

I know for myself I had to change from this really ACUTE way of thinking about end goals and come to a compromise that was better suited to my life. My real life, not the one I was making up in my head about how I would be happy if I just weighed X.

Here is what I can tell you about those thoughts after dealing with literally 10’s of thousands of clients.

You can be happy now. Irrespective of your weight goal.

I can’t remember who said it but it’s true “you can’t hate yourself lean”.

Once I started reaching really lofty goals I had to re-examine who I was and what my REAL “why” was.

I know now that if I had the right “why” I wouldn’t have needed to suffer to “quiet the noises in my head”.

Which isn’t to say that pushing yourself is bad.

What I will say though is that pushing yourself to suffer because when you are done the suffering seems somehow worth it won’t last. You will get hurt or look in the mirror and decide it’s not worth it or a million other things.

Whatever you do, however challenging it might be if you walk in that door and you aren’t excited to be there, stop going. Life is too short to not love what you do. To be clear, we all love doing hard things and once you are done there is that feeling of accomplishment. That doesn’t last.

What lasts are things you love, things that you are passionate about, things that when you walk in the door you are looking forward to the challenge.

The “voices in your head” are about happiness and living a life with meaning.

Loving what you do will take you farther. People often ask me what is best for optimal body composition and so I tell them. Then they will often say “but I love doing X”.

Then keep doing X. It will take you farther. You might need to add in some other things along with X if you want to pursue better body composition but if you take away the things you love and replace them with things that make you suffer because you think that’s what you need for should striations you are missing the point.

The last thing I will say on this top is that if you aren’t feeding the amazing things you are doing in your life you are missing the point. Doesn’t mean you never eat less but the majority of your life should be well fed. When you pair being well fed with doing things you love, your “why” becomes a whole lot easier.

Part of reaching BIG goals is setting them correctly in the first place, we can help. Simply click the link below and a coach can walk you through what your EXACT plan will be

https://www.eattoperform.com/

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