Face Your Face: Realism 101

Before you even think about it, you better shut the fuck up for a second and go through this. We all, and I mean all do this. We start out our little fitness experiment, some call it a phase, and we all kick it off with a vision. In most of our visions, it’s usually us standing at the end of the road - which we presume took around a month or so - looking so good we make Adonis look like a prison bitch.

Y’all be trippin monkey balls if you’ll keep thinking like that.

You are only setting yourself up for failure, disappointment and frustration if you think, even for a second, that there are shortcuts when it comes to fitness. If you’re going to the gym for a month or two before beach season so you don’t look like an incarnation of Shamu on the exclusive A-list beach party queue, then good for you, but then again, this post isn’t for you. It’s for the person who wants to actively take the first step towards actively changing the way they live. It’s about a commitment towards changing yourself for the better.

Setting goals and realistic expectations is arguably as every bit as important as nailing down the perfect nutrition/exercise plan. Setting goals isn’t only about telling yourself the road is long and hard. Hardly, it’s more about setting timeline expectation. It’s about setting milestones along the road so you can review your progress, check on what is working and what isn’t, and most important, to tweak your plan according to what you see so you can keep moving forward and avoid plateauing or falling behind.

For instance, most men or women who are in it for the fat loss think that it’s about putting in three hours on the treadmill and living off tuna, apples and lettuce for a few weeks. As I mentioned before, that road will only lead to seeming success with underlying fatal health risks. It’s simply not a sustainable mode of life. Being honest with yourself is key if you actually want to switch your life around. Set goals with deadlines. These deadlines don’t mean the road is over, they simply mean it’s time to look at what you’ve done over the past period of time and review whether or not it was working for you. Has your nutrition been on point? Have you noticed your diet needs more carbs? More fats? More proteins? Is your exercise on point? Do you need to switch up the kind of cardio you do? Do you need to lift heavier, or lift more? It’s all about these tiny little details.

Es hatte auch anders sein können

That’s emblazoned eternally in ink forever on my right outer thigh, and the German idiom simply translates to “It might as well have been otherwise”. In the context I found it in, it was about how the smallest and seemingly most insignificant of details are the ones that end up with the largest effects. Little things carry more weight collectively. It’s about the attention to details. Details as simple as quitting that daily can of Coca Cola, or replacing your sugar with honey for your morning tea, walking up the stairs instead of taking the lift if your destination isn’t too far up.

Little things.

Aside from planning ahead realistically, it’s just as important to leave your ego at the door. A lot of us assume that we can do more, or rather, over-estimate what your bodies are capable of within a certain time frame (blame the media for that!) and therefore become quickly frustrated when after an entire month in the gym we don’t look like those assholes on the fitness magazine covers. Your ego is largely responsible for that. You should learn never to compare yourself to others, and most of all, fitness professionals on magazine covers. You work a 9-5 (or longer if you’re me), you have responsibilities, errands, maybe kids, or even demanding pets (you might be me). Those people’s entire lives revolve around being fit, they get paid and get sponsored by supplements companies to look the way they do. You’re a normal human being operating under entirely different parameters, and it only gets worse as you get older and the responsibilities stack up.

You’re not going in there to squat 100 kgs on your first leg day. You’re not going to be doing jump-clap push ups and one handed hanging raises by your second week. Progress is termed so because it is progressive, it happens over time, and it takes time. There are no shortcuts if you want sustainable gains and successes. Cutting corners always ends up in failure; there is no other way around that.

Make a plan. Stick to it. Set milestones. Review it. Tweak it. Progress always.

Check yo self before you wreck yo self!