Spring Health/Fitness Challenges
Spring health and fitness challenges sound great to get you ready for summer, but you have to be careful. Some challenges may benefit your health while others can be harmful. I am currently participating in an 8 week health and fitness challenge. The challenge I am participating focuses on many aspects of health, not just weight loss. Each week we focus on another part to make ourselves healthier psychically, mentally, and emotionally.
At the beginning of this challenge, I was really excited to get started as we would be focusing on sleeping habits, reducing toxin intake, cleaning up our eating, etc. But each week we need to weigh in. Continually weighing myself is something I have not focused on in years, and now I remember why……… I hate the number I see when I look at the scale…….
Instead of focusing on how my body feels and looks…… I am now focusing on decreasing that number, even though I am well within the healthy weight range for a woman who is almost six feet tall. It is like that little self conscious voice has the fuel it needs to make me doubt myself when I look at the number on the scale.
Has this health and fitness challenge help me change some of my fitness or eating habits? Yes, it has, but it has also made me criticize myself harder than I have in a long time. When I started this challenge losing a bunch of weight was not my goal. My goal was to clean up some the things I needed to get back on track. I had let my sleep schedule suffer, was eating poorly, and I had a few other things in mind. Obsessing about my weight was not one of them…..
Getting Myself Back on Track
We are now in the last two weeks of the challenge and I have made the decision to stop weighing my self. Weighing myself causes more harm to my mental and emotional health than it does to benefit my physical health. Beating myself up over my weight is not worth the 1 point I would gain for each half pound I lost.
From now on I am going to focus on the parts of the challenge I really feel will benefit my health. This week we are focusing reducing the amount of added sugar, not multitasking while eating, drinking more water, increasing physical activity, and making time for ourselves. Those are the key elements I feel that will help me to become healthier person and to reduce my own stress. Not cause myself more by worrying about my weight. I am staying committed to my decision to complete this challenge, but I am doing so in a way that does not harm my mental or emotional health.
Until Next Time,
Janelle
