I only got in shape after getting rid of these 4 excuses.
If you’ve been thinking about going to the gym, dieting, or, more importantly, if you’ve tried in the past but didn’t stick to it
It is likely that your brain has been cultivating mental excuses that are simply preventing you from reaching your ideal body.
Whether it’s losing fat or building a muscular physique, these excuses tend to be the same.
You see, If you take a close look, there are only a handful of excuses we use to procrastinate, cheat the diet or avoid going to the gym, and convince ourselves that it’s okay.
Me first, when I started prioritizing my health a few years ago, I was big on procrastination.
Even though, now when people see me in the gym almost everyday at the same time, they assume it’s always been that easy for me.
Trust me, it wasn’t. I had to physically and mentally drag myself to the gym while juggling part-time work and full-time school.
And I’ll be honest, it was hard because my mind would come up with valid excuses for why I shouldn’t go to the gym.
The reason I’m telling you this is that no one taught me how to go to the gym, how to talk to people there, or the fundamentals of getting in shape.
I wasn’t the active sport type, I had to start from scratch, which allowed me to learn everything I needed to know.
That’s how I’ve managed to deconstruct these excuses in order to never let them influence my habits ever again.
And today you’ll learn how to get rid of the 4 most potent excuses preventing most people from reaching their ideal physique.
Lack of time
The first and most obvious mental barrier that you’ll face is thinking that you don’t have enough time.
And I don’t doubt the fact that your life is busy, maybe even overloaded with work, school, and responsibilities. I have no trouble believing that you’re occupied most of the time.
The thing is that you could have the time for exercise, although you can’t see it right now because you’re not considering it as a priority.
This is tricky and might even sound triggering, but it’s not that you don’t have time; it’s probably that you’re not managing your time as well as you could when it comes to your fitness.
When I was working a minimum wage job and going to school full-time, it felt like I had no room to change anything about my fitness or lack of it. It felt like it wasn’t in my top three priorities.
But I realized that after work and school, I’d usually spend my time scrolling on Instagram or watching Netflix episodes.
More than that, in the morning I’d wake up 30 minutes before school started. It’s not that I lacked time.
I was just only using my time for work and school, not even considering my health, and that’s exactly where you can deconstruct this excuse.
If you don’t have time to train right now, it’s most likely because you’re considering it as an option, a bonus. It is not; training is supposed to be non-negotiable, as important as your work.
That’s when you unlock a new potential, because if fitness time is non-negotiable, you’ll make it happen. Your brain will accept it and start treating it as a necessity.
Because if humans are very good at procrastinating, they’re also very good at making hard things possible under pressure.
It is your duty to remind yourself that time to take care of your body is mandatory, not optional.
Now, this mental process isn’t instantaneous; it’s a process. Because even when planning your workout sessions in your calendar, after work, you’re going to have to face your own brain telling you that you don’t have the time for that.
It’s going to tell you: Look, you have all these other things that are very important—homework, contracts to sign, meetings to arrange, or projects to plan out.
And you’ll have to ignore that and go to the gym regardless because the truth is, you have control over your own schedule.
Otherwise, it means that your time and ultimately your health are being controlled by your work, meetings, clients, teachers…
Now it’s unfair, because at the end of the day, not only are you running out of time, you’re also running out of motivation.
Lack of motivation
That may be the most pernicious reason preventing your from cultivating a healthy lifestyle where you exercise regularly and eat clean.
Now, there’s a lot to unpack when it comes to motivation. And I want to start by saying that motivation isn’t what you think it is.
A big part of why you have a hard time sticking to your healthy habits is because of this :
Motivation was never built to last; it comes and goes. It’s not reliable, and therefore you should not bet on it to get you to the gym and to eat clean.
I see that all the time with my clients. They start and feel motivated, and then it magically disappears after two weeks of hitting the gym.
And when that happens, their mind directly goes into thinking, “If I’m not motivated, it means that what I’m doing is wrong, otherwise, I’d be motivated. Exercise must not be for me”
This reasoning is logical and yet profoundly flawed because the motivation we’re talking about here is only built to be short-term.
You see, when you think about being fit -the six-pack, big chest, flat stomach … - your brain stores those thoughts and treats them as expectations.
It cultivates them in the back of your mind, and if there is one thing humans are very bad at, it’s being patient.
Your brain isn’t designed for patience; it wants everything as fast as possible, which makes sense in a survival setting.
Now, motivation is a booster. It’s an energizing state that your brain triggers to help you reach a certain reward, goal, or state.
That’s why you start going to the gym motivated and then you and your brain realize how hard it actually is to make real the expectations that you’ve been cultivating.
Your brain judges it “impossible” as it doesn’t see immediate results and receive instant gratification, and it stops energizing you through motivation.
You drop down, and you stop going, and that’s what’s supposed to happen. This will lead you to understand that motivation isn’t sustainable and you’ll never build your dream physique off of it.
To deconstruct this excuse of “not having enough motivation,” you’ll have to find another source of energy to replace the leaky motivation.
Now, nature is well balanced and gifted you with another energizing system that’s pretty much unlimited but more concealed than the motivation you’re used to experiencing.
That is willpower. You don’t need motivation to drive to a place, enter the building, and start lifting weights. Using your mind and your limbs, you’ll get to it.
The problem is that if you haven’t been cultivating willpower for fitness or you don’t fully understand how it works, it’ll be hard for you to tap into.
I wrote a whole article about willpower which you can find here.
What you have to take away from this is that if you bet on motivation to build your body, the journey is probably only going to last a few days or weeks at most.
If you want to make sustainable, you’ll have to learn how to use willpower effectively when it comes to your healthy habits.
Lack of energy
Now, motivation is a mobilizing state, which means that you get more energy when you’re motivated.
But the opposite is also true, and that’s why the lack of energy is tricky to get rid of.
First of all, there are two different types of energy: physical energy and mental energy. Mental fatigue is the result of a lot of decisions, thinking, planning and stimulations.
Whereas physical tiredness is simply because your body has been physically active and had to consume a lot of resources.
And for a ver long time I was convinced that I was experiencing physical fatigue and that was the reason why I couldn’t get to the gym, I was exhausted.
But it wasn’t, it was way more about being mentally drained that it was about my body.
If you are rather sedentary, just don’t use that much physical resources, so the problem is more likely to be mental fatigue.
Problem is that mental fatigue also triggers a constant state of exhaustion that is transferred onto the body.
Plus, the only state in which you can recover from this generalized fatigue - sleep - is highly mistreated.
Here’s where this gets even more problematic: The less energy you use, the less energy you’ll have.
Your body has essentially evolved to develop a big power-saving mode, which means that if you don’t use it, it automatically goes into saving mode.
That’s the danger of being sedentary: You don’t sleep well, so you don’t move a lot. You’re easily fatigued, so you move even less, and you end up not sleeping and being exhausted all the time.
Your lack of energy is not a valid excuse not to engage in physical activity as your lack of energy is the result of your lack of activity not the origin of the pain.
If you use this mental way out of telling yourself that the lack of energy is preventing you from training, you’ll simply never get out of this numb and burnout vicious cycle, as it will just amplify.
The solution is to gradually escape from inertia. Gradually is the magic spell here - you can’t (and certainly don’t want to) force your way out of it.
So many times I see people who are eager to get out of their exhaustion, and they start by doing 2-hour workouts just to end up even more worn out because they can’t handle that much physical pressure at this point in time.
Your way out is the same thing that got you trapped in the first place: consistency. And everything usually gets way better when you implement a proper sleep schedule.
Start by conditioning yourself to go to bed and wake up roughly around the same time every day. This is simple advice, and yet 30% of the population has clinical symptoms of insomnia. (ncoa.org)
Because the truth is that if you want to have more energy, you need to give your body the time it needs to recharge and reset.
This applies to both mental and physical fatigue; only a consistent and respected sleep schedule will help you do that.
Lack of confidence
Last on our agenda: confidence. This one is the one I hear the least even though it may be the most powerful excuse.
Most of the time, people either don’t think about it or don’t realize how much impact it has on their willingness to get in shape.
And I need to be straightforward: whatever it is that you start, maybe it’s going to the gym, cooking, or improving social interactions, you just won’t be confident at the beginning.
Confidence is not something you’re either born with or without. Confidence is a trait that you acquire through repeated practice in one realm of life.
I’ve been training for years, 4-6 days per week. This equals to a 1000 workouts, and sometimes, when I’m trying a new exercise that I’ve never practiced, I still don’t feel fully confident.
Not being confident is an indicator that you need practice, not that you should stop whatever it is that you’re starting.
I can’t remember how many times I’ve heard clients tell me, “I don’t feel confident in the gym.” Most of the time, the social environment is the problem.
They’re scared of being judged, looked at, and negatively perceived by other people. But the simple truth is that most people are just too focused on their own thing to pay attention to you.
More than that, most of the people that you see at the gym aren’t confident either. And maybe it’s not even about the gym, maybe you’re just not that confident in a social setting, and that’s fine.
I wasn’t either. When starting, I was convinced that everyone was looking at me and judging my poor technique, so I always wore headphones and a cap to narrow and focus my attention by reducing my vision field.
Lack of confidence is not a valid excuse for you not to build your physique because it’s a prerequisite for learning. You can’t possibly feel confident because you haven’t built the skills yet.
Here’s another reason why lack of confidence cannot stop you from training:
If you never start exercising or you start and then stop because you’re scared of being judged by others in the gym, they have control over you.
They have control over you, think about this, it means that you’re giving other people the power to decide if you’re fit or not.
Think about this: it means that you’re giving other people the power to decide if you’re fit or not.
This will lead you to a life full of “what if” and “I wonder if,” also known as regrets. You have to claim that power, start going to the gym, and realize that most people don’t care about what you do in the gym as long as you don’t interfere with their workout.
We have just deconstructed the 4 main excuses that are preventing most people from establishing healthy habits leading to sculpting their ideal body
Remember this: your brain is always going to give you valid reasons not to do something because it’s designed for preservation. It will try and convince you to stay in the comfort zone as it knows it’s the least intimidating place. But it is your mission to say no to that.
But you can’t let those mental excuses dictate your behavior; otherwise, you hand over control of your life to those very excuses.
You owe it to yourself. Start.
As always, I hope this helps. Trust the process.
References :
https://www.better.org.uk/content_pages/top-gym-excuses
www.ncoa.org/adviser/sleep/sleep-statistics/