I Feed My Pain

If you consider your fitness life as a long marathon, the guilt factor acts as a speed breaker or rumble strip in your mind, preventing you from moving forward. If these strips are stronger than your will to move on, your target will always be out of your reach. This also explains your approach towards your own guilt. If your will is strong enough to overcome the guilt and handle it effectively, then you are on the right path to success. Speaking of guilt, it is basically the outcome of our indulgence in any activity which breaks the rhythm and pattern of our fitness regime or diet schedule. You need to develop a great deal of mental strength to counter your guilt and move ahead to learn from your past experiences and mistakes. You must have noticed that nowadays every sports team has their own psychological therapist to help the players handle the pressure situations arising from the game. In the very first chapter I had emphasised the human tendency to sacrifice something, only to over-indulge as a result of the deprivation. Whenever we give in to this tendency, we feel guilty. Not only have we broken our rhythm, but we do not enjoy the break either, just because of guilt. To move forward, we need to deliberately handle our guilt in a confident manner. All of us love food. As I have already mentioned, sacrifice is impossible for the majority of people. No matter how long you manage to keep away from your favourite food, one day you will end up eating it again. If you are fond of spicy or non vegetarian food, or have a sweet tooth, you could certainly sacrifice it all in a bid to be committed to your activity. But how long do you think you can realistically resist before your resolve grows weaker and weaker, and you finally break? When that happens, you feel like you have cheated yourself and question your self-control. This is where guilt develops—I term it as the breaking point. It is the point where you start resenting having given up something, so much so that you move from not doing anything about it, to protesting by over-indulgence. This story is not only applicable to your diet, but is true for your workout regime, too. Often, when you are unable to sacrifice your pleasure-seeking and lazy tendencies and end up missing your workout, you start feeling guilty. This breaking point usually manifests as a negative expression of emotions within us. Psychologically, it is very destructive for us. For example, I break my diet, go out for a meal and feel guilty later, spend a lot of my time complaining and worrying about my break from discipline. This makes me feel bad about myself and even negates the momentary happiness I had got from my meal. How many times you have done this? Frankly, these instances or events never really end in our life, so this breaking point becomes a familiar feature. The consideration here is not what you indulged in, but what your perception was. Any specific negative reaction towards yourself is not acceptable. All it does is cause a fall in your confidence. Likewise, anyone who is concentrating too much on calories, either in the context of exercises or disrupting diet patterns will have paranoid thoughts of their own degradation. In the end, it becomes a major issue and distracts you from reaching your goals. In my view, if you think along such lines even after being regular with your activity and committed to your diet, then your fitness efforts are pointless. Your efforts of exercising, getting up early to make time for your regime, or sacrificing your favourite delicacies while dining out with your friends should definitely be worth more than that. Remember: do not give guilt more importance than it deserves. The mind tends to draw your attention towards worst case scenarios and even at a small deviation from your regime you tend to think negatively. I am sure you would agree that if the end result of exercising so religiously is to feel this way, then it seems rather pointless to put in the effort at all. When you realise that you are reaching the breaking point, from where guilt arises, you need to consciously take steps to counterpoise your own misdoing. In fact, we shouldn't even call it a ‘misdoing’ since you enjoyed it while doing it. We should go to the greatest extent possible to accommodate our desires without hampering our regimes. So, you can enjoy your food without feeling guilty about it. When I take a break from my regime and eat out, I make it a point to enjoy myself. But at the same time, I prevent guilt from taking over, by tailoring my diet and regime over the next few days to counter any ill effects. In this way, I can maintain the fitness of my body for years. So don't think that one doesn’t need to work hard to pay for any indulgence, but just prepare your mind to be strong enough to work it all off. Remember that your efforts at fitness are not justified if you don’t feel happy or can’t enjoy things that you like. First and foremost, be positive about whatever you enjoy. In my entire professional career and experience, I have witnessed that either people behave like fanatics trying to run away from food to maintain their regime, or else they cannot survive the resistance and complain constantly. The reason for these varied responses is simply a person’s perception. How do you want to perceive your regime? Sometimes, over-thinking your actions and intentions also make you judgmental. I have seen that over-analysis can sometimes completely paralyse one’s thoughts. In such a scenario, you just need to relax, put aside your guilt and focus back on your next step.