Day #14 – How Do You Maintain Self Discipline?

When I’m good, I’m very good, but when I’m bad I’m horrid; and I’m not just talking fitness.  Case in point: today’s goals were to clean the entire house, trim the shrubs and work on the bookkeeping for our business.

So I went Christmas shopping at Walmart.

But, seriously, who the hell wants to clean the house?  Our friends are coming over for dinner on Friday, so in my family we say, “Thank God for company, otherwise we’d never clean the house.”  This goes for Henri too, only substitute “mow the lawn” for “clean the house.”  Don’t get me wrong, it’s relatively tidy, but I have a five-year-old, three-year-old, and a husband, so the chances of the house remaining clean for three days in a row are about as likely as winning the lottery while being struck by lightning while eating a gluten free cookie that tastes like the real thing.

I guess my self motivation is not defined by the “what” (i.e. – clean the house) so much as by the “why” (i.e. – ’cause friends are coming and I don’t want them to see how we really live.)  But if you were to substitute, say, my mother visiting instead of our laid back friends, you can bet some hard money I’d be vacuuming instead of blogging right now.  (See?  A much more powerful “why,” don’t you think?)

The same thing goes with eating clean and fitness.  If the “what” is, “I want to eat clean,” and the “why” is, “because I’m supposed to,” the chances of me staying motivated are nil.  But if the “why” is, “because I’m going to stand on stage in a bikini and have my body compared against 20 other women,”  Ima put that cookie down and eat the broccoli.

So now that I’m in the off season, my new “why” to eating clean is because I want my family to be healthy.  That’s actually a really powerful motivator, because prior to this year we mostly just ate cereal.  But now I started making salmon twice a week for the Omega 3s and threw away (for real!) the remaining Halloween candy last week.  And what’s really cool is that my mom asked me to help her with her diet.  (She’s diabetic.)  I guess another “why” that motivates me to be healthy is that I want to be a good example for my kids.  If I show no self discipline and always drink soda instead of water or eat chips instead of vegetables, how can I expect them to grow up to make healthy choices?

Well, guess I better clean the house now.

How about you?  How do you maintain self discipline?

Lisa

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