E5: New Year, New Me Bollocks!

3 of my absolute MUSTS to change when trying to succeed with your Health and Fitness Resolutions in 2023.

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Transcript

Speaker A: Hi, everyone. I'm Ben Johnson, mental health and exercise coach, private gym owner from You Castle Online, coach of the Revival program and outnumbered dad of two strong independent daughters just like my wife, and I can't get a word in with them at home. Here's my chance. Welcome to my podcast. This show is a combination of my own personal growth, life experiences and experiences of coaching people for over a decade to help improve their health, happiness and life fulfillment. There's a lot of people struggling to find sustainable physical and mental health solutions, so I want to provide you with some key insights and key tools to help. If you find this information useful or even just enjoyable, it would be absolutely amazing. If you hit the Share button or leave a comment. You can also follow me on any of my social media platforms that can be found in the description text of this show. Episode Five and the last one of 2022 as the year draws to a close, it's often a time where we all sort of reflect back and we might do some planning forwards as well. And for many, it can feel like a bit of a fresh start or an opportunity to plan some big changes in particularly these things that we know as New Year's resolutions. So episode five is going to be all about that exactly, new Year's resolutions and in particularly health and fitness ones. Personally, I'm not really one for just a change in a number or changing a date to be the determinant factor for massive goals or massive changes. For me, 31st 2022 to the first of 2023. It's not a magic ******* one, but I do get it. As for many people, it is the only real time of the year that they do any self reflection. And it's the only real time of year that they might make some desired plans for changes that they want to make in their life. So each to their own. And I'm not saying that it's right or wrong. I'm just saying that it's not my personal preference. But what I want to do is help the people who it is. So this episode, I want to provoke more thought around these resolutions and more importantly, help people overcome being stuck like a record falling for the same traps year on year on year. A great quote that a lot of my members hear me say and that I absolutely love is madness is doing the same thing over and over and expect a different outcome. I want to help you stop the madness. And the madness being the same ****** health and fitness resolutions for the past five years, potentially decades, which has gotten you absolutely nowhere so far, long term. When I said that, quick question, just as before we go on. How many years have you made a health and fitness resolution and not achieved it by the year end? Can you put a number on that, actually. How many years have you given up and field at the New Year's resolution for your health and fitness by March, even February, never mind the year end? Can you put a number on those? I'm guessing most people listen to this, that number will be quite high. And it's demoralizing, isn't it? All of these failures, they're going to law your confidence, they're going to lower your selfworth. And even worse, what they might do or where you might be right now, is at a point where you even stop giving a **** or stop trying and just accepting that you're going to feel **** and that your health and fitness is **** forever. What I want to do is be here to tell you that, first of all, that's not all your fault. Things like media, social media, some influencers some health and fitness in brackets, professionals, previous generations, including family members, which might be a shock or a stark realization for some people. All of these people and places, they've added to your current health and fitness, or lack of. Before I begin, what I want to do today is share three absolute must things to change and consider in order to change, in order to succeed with your health and fitness resolutions in 2023. That's the main bit of what I want to get across in this episode. But before I do, I just want to point out, I think a lot of people do forget this in the UK and in other Northern hemisphere countries. Thanks for tuning in, by the way. It's fairly miserable in terms of it's wetter, it's colder, it's darker in January and February and some of March as well. So to think that all of your motivation struggles that you've struggled with from October, November, December are going to poof vanish just because it's a new year, it's pretty naive to think that we still need to address those issues as well in terms of motivation. And just going a little bit further, a little bit on a tangent, I've spoken about sort of six week, eight week, four week fat loss shredden camps in previous episodes. But again, I believe that they're adding to the long term consistent problems that you and a lot of people have got with your health and fitness routines in terms of exercise, nutrition, mindset, motivation, they're not really helping you overcome any habitual behavioral and cognitive struggles. Cognitive, I'm talking about mindset and motivation, which all of those things, habitual behavioral, cognitive struggles, the need changing, their necessity, put my teeth back in for sustainable change. What these six week, eight week fat, what fat, four week fat loss shredded camps are doing are just pushing your willpower to the absolute maximum, which unfortunately will break. It will be short lived, which you can probably relate to for the very vast majority of people. So my advice before I move on, don't fall for these again. Remember, madness is doing the same thing over and over and expect a different outcome. So you got a little bit sidetracked there. So getting back to the main stuff, the stuff that I want to share, the three key things to change in order to succeed with your health and fitness resolutions in 2023, feel free to write these down. Number one, change your goals instead of being outcomedriven. So I want to get fitter in 2023, I want to lose two stone in 2023, or I want to run a marathon or half marathon in 2023, which are all huge outcomes that can often seem massively, overwhelming, fairly distant. And if they're not achieved within a month or maximum two months, then it's very easy to give up because of the lack of perceived achievement. Or on the flip side, that if they are achieved in such a short space of time, a month or two, you realize quickly that's unsustainable, you can't really accommodate your other priorities in life and you can't accommodate other things that you enjoy in life. So you give up. So instead of being outcome driven, need to start being driven by process goals. These are ones that are smaller things like day to day or weekly habits and behaviors. I'll give you some examples going to bed by 10:00, prepping your breakfast before bed the night before. Doing two workouts per week for a minimum of 45 minutes. They are just some examples of lords. They're all process goals and they're going to feel more achievable and they're going to feel way less overwhelming. I'd recommend with any focuses on these, I would just focus on between two to five process calls at any one time until they feel like they're part of your everyday life and a part of your lifestyle and they're ingrained. And then from there you can add some new ones in or you can make tweaks to them, but between two to five at any one time is what I would recommend. Number two change your focus. Instead of always having goals focused around shape, weight, fat loss, which mainly comes from my experience of coaching hundreds of people from your poor body image and for anybody who doesn't know, body image being how you perceive the way that you look and how you think, others think about the way you look as well. So basically, instead of always having these goals focused around shape, weight and fat loss or just looking better again, what the hell does that mean? What does look and better mean? Just conform into these body ideals. We've got to start forming goals focused on how you feel and how you perform. You can improve your body image by focusing on something called body appreciation. That means being grateful for what your body and your mind can do without physical and mental limitations in life. Some examples focus on your strength workouts, on how much more independent you can become rather than just big guns or Big Buns or whatever it is. Suns out. Guns out. Suns out. Buns out. Another example focusing your cardio workout on giving you more capability to play with your kids if you've got a family, rather than just how many calories you burn calories in versus calories out. Fat loss. Last example focusing yoga workout on improving your mobility to be able to move freely, pain free, to be able to do more the hobbies, more the activities that you used to love when you were younger but you've just accepted with age that it's not that way anymore. Rather than focusing on doing a yoga workout just for shape changes or losing body fat again, I'd recommend writing down what your focus and what your intention is for each type of workout you do every week based on all those examples that I've just given you. But you can, of course, personalize those for you. You can make changes that are personal for you when you're thinking about how you change the focus. Finally, number three, change your whole approach. This sounds massive, but bear with us. I'm going to explain it's not such a huge thing. Instead of falling for the same trap again and signing up to or following some sort of rigid, surface level regime around your exercise nutrition methods that's probably going to promote the likes of guilt, worry, anxiety, and inevitably leading to another failure long term going to start following a more flexible, more realistic, and more sustainable approach. One that's going to give you some probably weekly or monthly standards around your selfcare, your exercise nutrition, etc. For which you're going to be able to move around with your ever changing, crazy busy lives, especially if you've got kids in full time or part time jobs. And when you've got this flexible approach, it means that you're less likely to follow this stop, start over and over again pattern that you've probably struggled with for so long. Because you're going to be able to follow some rules and standards that you're going to achieve by accepting that life is definitely going to throw some curveballs that is inevitable, but you're going to be able to adapt them and then that's going to be able to create a consistently healthier lifestyle. Flexible, realistic, sustainable approach instead of rigid, unrealistic, unsustainable. All three of those areas that I've just shared are things that we're going to be working on inside both the coaching programs, but not just at New Year. This isn't something that we do just at New Year. We're going to visit these regularly every couple of months so that in July we're still making progress, in September we're still making progress. And even in December 2023, next year, our team members are still going to be making progress. I hope this information is something that you can keep in mind. Please, please feel free to revisit it closer to the New Year depending on when you're listening to this and depend on when you want to do a little bit of self reflection and plan for the year ahead. It is my continued mission in 2023 to improve the physical health, mental health and happiness of people all over the world through this podcast, through my social media pages. The links are in the text description and also through my personal coaching services, again, which you can find through the text description or on my social media pages. I'm not going to lie, this is the last one of 2022. I've absolutely loved starting these podcast episodes just back in October this year. It's an amazing feeling to get messages, comments from people in the UK, Australia, New Zealand to buy about how much they're benefiting. So the more that you share them, the more that you comment, the more that you subscribe. That means a bigger amount of people are going to benefit as well. So thank you to anybody who has done, thank you to anybody who does in the future, please keep doing it. I'm going to be back to two episodes per month in 2023. If there's any specific topics that you want us to COVID I don't bite. Shoot us a message on any of my social media pages and I'll see if it's within my experiences. If not, we'll probably have a laugh about it. I'm also looking forward to some guests on future episodes in 2023, which I'm buzzing about, but for now, I wish you all the best. I wish you happier, healthier and fit at 2023. Thank you very much for tuning in. Thanks for sharing. If you need to finders, I'm gonna be off this month having corbyn amounts of amber at all and blue cheese and probably ****. Lord de Sanders. Take care.