Willpower is a Muscle

Happy New Year!

I heard something yesterday that really struck a chord with me. “Willpower is a muscle. The more you use it, the stronger it gets.”

I’ve been thinking about that a lot today. You’ve noticed I haven’t posted anything in awhile. These last 8 months or so have been really difficult ones for me. I’ve allowed the stress to be an excuse to not stay on my plan. And it shows. I’ve gained quite a bit of weight back, I’ve become depressed, I haven’t been working out as much. It’s all connected. This past weekend some bootcamp buddies of mine got together with me and we did a little meal prep class. I was hoping that pouring out my knowledge in this area to people who were interested to learn would help to get me motivated again. And it did. That plus a picture someone took of me in front of said class. Yikes.

So back to the willpower quote. I know that when I workout regularly it really only takes a couple of weeks before I start seeing definition in my muscles. It’s a lot faster than most people realize. When you feed your body enough protein and exercise, your muscles just love it. And they show you that love. When you stop working out, it only takes about a week before you notice less definition. It’s definitely one of those use-it-or-lose-it situations. Willpower definitely works the same way. If I stop using my willpower and start giving into temptation, my ability to say no grows weaker. I start making poorer and poorer choices. I guess that’s another argument for not giving in to the excuse of, “I’ve been doing so well, one donut won’t hurt me.”

Don’t get me wrong, we do need to reward ourselves, we do need those occasional cheats. But they need to be planned in advance so that willpower and temptation are not part of the decision of what’s going in our mouths.

Tomorrow will be day 4 back on my plan, I started Monday rather than waiting until today. You know how hard it is when you go back to exercising after not doing it for awhile? Exercising willpower is the same way. It’s a lot harder getting started since it’s been so long. But the sooner we get started, the closer we are to seeing some definition, right?