Tuesday 29th November 2016
I have been overweight all my life, even as a child. My parents wanted me to lose weight so they gave me incentives.
Things like if you get down to a certain weight I will buy you a new outfit or I will give you a pound for every pound you lose, they even offered to take me somewhere special.
All the incentives were really good – they really knew how to dangle that carrot.
The trouble is carrots aren’t my favourite – perhaps they should have dangled chocolate!!
But I don’t know why I never took their incentives. It must have been because it seemed too much like hard work.
Today I got on the treadmill and ran for 30 minutes without stopping. I made a comment to my trainer saying that “I have seen people run for half an hour on the treadmill before and I always wondered how they could have the stamina to do it”
The thing is, my trainer didn’t make me run for that long, it was me who wanted to carry on. I realised if he had asked me to run longer I wouldn’t have been happy but because I made the decision for myself I could do it.
It made me think of that dangled carrot and I realised that the only person who could dangle it and make me do it -is me.
It’s like this year, anyone could have given me incentives to lose weight but none of them would have worked unless I came to the decision for myself.
I am now making good decisions and listening to good advice. I am doing it now because I was ready to listen. If it was last year I would have thought everyone was nagging!
So true.
It only works when it comes from within.