Having been a personal trainer for quite a number of years now, something that I’ve observed in many people when it comes to client psychology is this concept of beating yourself up when you slightly go off the rails in terms of your eating or your exercise habits or anything related to health and fitness. Now, what I commonly see is that people will have stuck to their goals, they’ve been really good and then they’ll have a few bad things in terms of food, or they miss a few workouts, something breaks their rhythm. Then they get really hard on themselves, and they don’t forgive themselves for those small little failures and they turn a little stumble into a massive, epic fall.
What happens is they go completely off the rails because they’re so focused on being perfect and as soon as they have a slight variation from that, they think it’s the biggest ordeal in the world. They end up completely losing their training mojo and their healthy eating mojo and they end up unravelling all the good habits that they’ve spent a fair bit of time and effort building into their life.
When you look at it from the outside looking in, it seems really stupid. It seems illogical and it’s completely emotional. From being a normal person as well myself, I know that there’s many things that I’ve done that with as well and we’re all human and we all make mistakes. But I think if you can forgive yourself quickly when it comes to those mistakes, you’ll be much more likely to have success in whatever it is health and fitness wise that you’re trying to achieve.