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My Not so Perfect Journey
When I first started my health and fitness journey, I struggled with many aspects of success and still struggle with these today. One of my biggest struggles was something many of us ladies struggle with, and that was the battle of the scale. When I decided to go vegan due to eating less processed foods, my weight naturally started to drop. However, after about two years, I found myself struggling to make the number on the scale drop, and I started to get very discouraged on my journey. During this time, I was not only eating better, I was working out and started weight training. It wasn’t until I started studying to be a Certified Nutrition Coach (CNC) that I came to the realization that muscle and fat are two different elements and hold weight differently.
However, before discovering that, I was consistently pushing myself to stay on the perfect regimen. I took away foods that I loved because I saw small progress and started to love the person I was becoming, until I went to the doctor and they told me I was significantly low in iron. I thought I did everything perfectly: ate well, stayed away from junk, and even started going to the gym almost every single day. Well, little did I know that this perfect regimen I tried to follow would be my downfall. I started to grow increasingly frustrated and even questioned if this was the lifestyle I really wanted to live. I didn’t seem to have time for hours in the gym, balancing my nutrition, meal prepping, taking care of my children, and being a wife. There came a point in my journey where I thought, “If I can’t commit to this 100%, then I should just let it go.”
Luckily for me, one thing I love to do is learn. I love information, and I love applying new things to my life to make it better. Most people would call me driven; however, I say it is that I understand that god has placed all of us here for a reason—to be of service in some capacity—and we all possess the ability to learn and retain information for a reason. At different parts of my journey, as I started to learn about nutrition and started learning about personal training, I realized that changing something or pivoting your journey in a different direction does not mean you have failed. What that means is we are taking the information that we learned and making steps to keep moving forward. That, my friends, is progress.
Choosing Again= Progress
One of the things that I really struggled with and felt like I failed at was when I realized that I needed to incorporate more protein into my diet to help me meet my goals. After being vegan for three years and then transitioning into being vegetarian, I felt like I was failing in my journey because I did not want to go back to eating meat. I spent three years as a vegan and seven years as a vegetarian. So after 10 years of my life eating meat free, I hit a roadblock. I had less energy, my iron was low, and I felt the worst I had felt in a while. In order to keep from feeling like I failed, I started to learn that part of our journey is not to be perfect in one thing; it’s to continue to do our best at making consistent progress. Sometimes progress looks like taking a break from the gym to get your home in order or incorporating meat back into your diet because it will give you the nutrition you need at the stage in life you are at.
That is what it is all about, and half of the battle is realizing that true progression is not living in the past is about choosing something different to help you navigate a current and future goal; it’s realizing that the fast food you consistently ate as a young adult will no longer serve you as a mother with a busy household in your 40s. Progress is looking for the sweet spot that works in the moment and not being afraid to take the next step, even if it means you have to stop doing something that worked for you so well in the past. Above all, progress is loving yourself enough to do your best and give yourself the grace you deserve to choose another path that may serve your journey better.
The Gift
Perfection is chasing something that simply cannot exist in the current moment because, to grow and move forward, progress is what will always get you to the destination, and it looks different to everyone. To one person, someone in the gym who is overweight can look like they don’t take care of themselves, when being in the gym is literally them making progress. Progress is someone who decided to stop drinking alcohol for their fitness goals, but to others, it may look like they are no longer fun to be around. The beauty of progress is that it is what we choose it to be, not a false sense of what we think we should be doing based on others around us or false information.
This is why I adopted this saying: “Progress Over Perfection—Always!” It allows me to be grateful for the moments. It reminds me that God placed me on this earth with a gift that should be used to be of service to others, not to strive for perfection. If we are always striving for perfection, we will always be living in the future, hoping that we are doing the right thing. And I do not know about you, but I love living in my gift, “the present.” Living in my gift allows me to give myself the grace that is required for me to learn and continue moving forward. Living in my gift means I learn something new every day that I can use to help myself and others thrive. Living in my gift can be enjoying a cup of tea on my porch in the morning because I decide that the gym was not what I need to do that morning.
Perfection
This can sound to many like I am saying don’t do the things that are hard or do what we feel, because there are days when I feel like I want to eat ice cream every day and not worry about my health. This is where balance comes in. Yes, I can say that the desire for perfection drive or encourage our goals; however, when you are living in your gift but always striving for perfection, it does not allow you to celebrate your moments of progress. If your goal is to live a healthier lifestyle, perfection can lead us to believe things about ourselves that can discourage our process and stop our progress. This is why many people struggle with sticking to diets.
For me, deciding to go vegan was for my health to begin with. At some point in my journey, it became my identity, and when that identity needed to change, I felt like I was failing. However, I had to remind myself why I did it to begin with, and that was to improve my health—the primary goal that started me on this path. I felt so guilty when I started to eat meat, especially when my children, who for 10 years of their lives knew this about me, saw me eat meat, and they looked at me with shock and asked me what I was doing. Those moments were moments that made me feel like I failed, not because it would improve my life, but because even to my kids, that lifestyle was who their mother was.
However, I used that moment to tell my kids that I needed to change my lifestyle to help me feel better, and over time, it was no longer foreign to them to see me eat meat. What I realized in that moment is that my struggles taught my kids that they can change things in their lives to help them progress towards a goal, that it does not have to be one way or the other, and that what is important is the goal for a healthier me not a perfect one.
Progress Over Perfection- Always!
Always keep in mind that we are meant to evolve. The definition of evolving is to develop, change, or gradually transform into a more advanced, improved, and mature state over time. The definition of progress is moving forward or improving towards a desired goal. It is the process of advancing, developing, or getting better over time. Simply put, evolution requires progress.
So, for anyone who is struggling to start a process, no matter what it is, always remember that if you are making progress, no matter how big or small, you are right where you need to be. Treat mistakes or setbacks not as failure but as information that you can progress from. If you are not sure where to start, choose one small step, one small realistic action. Treat steps like currency that you are stacking in a savings account, and understand that after so many steps and time, you will have enough money in your account to buy the goal you are striving for now.
Even in this moment, as I write this blog, I think about my journey 10 years ago. In many aspects of my life, I am living in the moments that I dreamed about, not because I got lucky, not because I did everything perfectly, but because I decided that these goals were important enough for me to attain and keep making progress towards, and no matter how long it’s been, if you look back on every aspect of your life, there are moments where you decided you wanted something in life and ave actually attained it or are currently living in it. We get so wrapped up in the future that we don’t take the time to enjoy our gift of the present and realize that we have arrived from where we were years before and in my opinion that is the real success in life.
Whatever it is you are trying to attain, you do not have to get everything right to keep growing. Give yourself grace, recognize how far you have come, and keep choosing your next steps no matter how big or small, and remember,
PROGRESS OVER PERFECTION—ALWAYS!
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