This ever happen to you?

You realize that you want to lose the weight and to get into phenomenal shape. You believe that your health is important to you, and that you want to improve the quality of your life through diet and exercise. You feel that this time it will be different, that this time the changes will stick and you’ll become the best version of yourself.

Starting out with great intentions and high expectations, the first few days go well. You’re making the time to exercise. You’re eating vegetables and proteins. You’re avoiding sugar, packaged snacks, and soda.

After day 3, you step on the scale and find that the number has gone down! You’re making progress towards your goal and that feels good.

The next day something unexpected happens. You catch a cold. It would only aggravate your illness to exercise in this condition, so you wisely take the day off. That night you find yourself eating comfort food for dinner. You are feeling sick, so it seems justified.

A week later you think about returning to the gym, but your cousin is graduating from the police academy and there’s a family celebration. A slice of graduation cake later, and you’re in no condition to exercise. As your insulin levels soar and your energy dips, you tell yourself that tomorrow is the day that you get back on track.

Tomorrow brings with it more unexpected turns, pushing your healthy lifestyle just out of reach.

There’s a very simple reason for this phenomenon: If you’re looking for an excuse the universe will provide you with one. Every. Single. Time.

But I’m not looking for an excuse. Those things were out of my control. I wanted to stick with the program, but I caught a cold and then life got busy.

If someone offered you a million dollars to stick with your diet and exercise program for 6 months could you do it?

You bet you could! And you’d probably even do it for 100 thousand dollars.

This means that if you had a great enough incentive then you’d stick with your program and get results. So right now the incentive, the motive, the desire just isn’t great enough to protect you against all of the excuses that the universe has to throw at you.