It’s coming to that time of year again, resolution time. New Years Resolutions to be exact. And with a mindset of starting a resolution on January 1st you’ve pretty much kicked December to the curb, you’ve created an excuse to let things slide until then.

Waiting for a future date to initiate change is a mindset that can stop you from ever reaching your goals. You learn and start accepting that when things don’t go right you’ll try again on the 1st of the next month (or maybe it will be the next Monday or some other significant date), this cycle then becomes nearly impossible to break.

I understand that Christmas involves social and family get-togethers that will challenge eating healthy and make exercising regularly a bit harder, a bit more inconvenient.

But reaching your fitness and health goals is never going to be convenient. And setting future start dates is unlikely to bring success.

If you want to make a change then the time is now, not a future date. And if you stuff a day up the sun-up on the next day is the time to start again.

We need to develop a mindset that things will go wrong, that some days we will stuff up, however, these situations shouldn’t then end up into day after day of stuffing up. The next day after a poor day is the day to get back on track. No successful person hasn’t had challenges and days where everything went wrong at some point. The only difference is successful people understand this and then get back on track the very next day.

With it being December there is a common mindset of I will start again after the holiday season, the truth is this is a mindest we want to avoid, there are still loads of fruitful days left in the year, days where you can exercise and eat well and still enjoy the festive season occasions.

And let’s be honest, the people saying they will wait till the 1st of January to start their changes will possibly never change. The likely outcome? By the middle of January, they are back to where they were mid-December, in the mindset of making a change on the 1st of February or some other date in the future. Meaning no change has been made at all.

New Year’s resolutions don’t work, the only thing that works is consistent effort and discipline along with the understanding that one bad day shouldn’t be the catalyst to giving up and waiting for a future date to start again.

There are no shortcuts in being healthy, whether you want to drop some fat, perform at your best, our feel better the change-maker for this is consistent focus over a long period.

Don’t wait for December to end and the 1st to roll around to make the change. The festival season is a celebration season, not a time to put your health on hold. Balance is the key for this time of year.

See you in the gym soon!!