Life is ALL about choices!

It certainly is, isn't it?  Should I workout today or wait until tomorrow?  Should I eat this apple or dive into that cookie?  Should I make good choices or bad choices?  Am I going to start today and do what I need to do to feel good or should I wait until tomorrow or Monday?  Life is about choices, always has been, always will be.

I have always been a black and white person, all or nothing.  Mediocracy and the grey area have never been in my nature.  Although in some areas this might be good, I am finding that it doesn't apply to everything.

In efforts to loose the last bit of weight and to create a lifestyle the invites health, I have learned that it can't be taken with an all or nothing attitude.  While an "all" attitude gets your workouts in and has you eating healthy and doing healthy behaviors, a person can burn out and can find themselves in the "nothing" attitude.  This attitude will undo all the good you did when you were doing the "all."  It creates a yo-yo of your life.  I spent well over a decade with this type of outlook.  I gained a lot more then I ever lost with this outlook as well.  All or nothing hasn't worked at all for me in my weight loss journey.

What I have found that has caused success isn't mediocracy either.  I never thought that I was living in the "gray area" either, I have realized that I HAVE been.  I have been doing well with the exercise and for the most part I have been eating well, but I need to do better.  Being in the grey area of things leaves you wanting to do better.  So in pondering recently, the thought of choices has become apparent.  You can be having a challenging day and you just want to do nothing at the end of it.  But here lies a choice.  Do you continue doing nothing being engulfed by the challenge of the day, or do you make a choice to do something else, something that gets you closer to your life's goals?  For instance, at the end of a day where the kids have been challenging, the house is a mess and I just want to do nothing, I have a choice.  Do I just sit on the couch and watch TV or get lost in a book and "relax" or do I do something that has me going to bed one step closer to my desired lifestyle?  I have the choice to workout and know I did something to get me closer to the goal of the lifestyle I want to create.  Nevermind that I didn't eat as well as I would have liked, or that I didn't fold the laundry or get some computer work done, I made the choice and worked out.  In that moment of decision, I decided to make a choice that brought me closer, not farther from my goals.

In life so often we are a victim of circumstance.  We just go through life and blame the things around us for not being or doing the things we want.  "I am too busy to focus on myself."  "If only I had more time." "If I had more money, time, health, space, happiness..." You fill in the blank.  This is easy to do and to get caught up in.  In life, I have learned, that you need to make the decision and then to make the choices that follow that decision.  It's our human nature to also sabotage ourselves.  We get used to a certain thing a certain schedule and we sabotage ourselves out of fear of what we could have. If you want something for yourself, you need to fight for it.  If you don't, you'll probably never achieve it.  In my life, if I want to have the lifestyle in which I dream of, it's not going to be handed to me and it's certainly not going to be easy or I would be living it right now.  I am going to have to fight for it.  I will have to make choices that bring me closer and avoid the ones that bring be farther.  We aren't stagnant in our lives.  We are either moving towards our goal or away from it, and it's always by choice.  If we are in a place we don't want to be, it's because we have chosen to be there through the choices we have made.

With this in mind, I find myself making better chioces.  By knowing that in every choice I am either getting closer or farther from my goal I must remember the decision I have made.  The decision to make choices that will bring me closer to my lifestyle goal.  Since I have made this decision to get closer to my goal, the choices will eventually get easier simply by the practice of doing so.  If I find a choice that is challenging, I will have to fight to achieve my goal.  The achievement of goals in life is not given, or stumbled across by accident, they are fought for.