HOW TO START YOUR FITNESS JOURNEY
A GUIDE TO MINDSET
I often talk about my journey when it comes to health and fitness. But you only really understand how far you have travelled until you stop and look back.
What started out as a quest to love my body and essentially just look good, evolved into a desire to live a wonderful life. I spent a year lifting weights, doing HIIT and drinking protein shakes and then life decided to show me there was so much more to health than that. I began focusing more on what was going into my body, not just the fuel but the thoughts too. Were they positive? Negative? I wanted to live well so I had to not only change my body and food, but my mind too.
It was almost 5 years ago that my attitude to health shifted and my fitness journey began. But even then, it was anything but plain road… Back in the day, being ‘healthy’ meant hitting the gym daily, lifting weights and sweating hard so that I felt accomplished, paying zero attention to what my body was actually craving at the time. It also meant paying zero attention to my emotional wellbeing or nutrition.
Thankfully, in recent years I’ve started to explore the topic of health and fitness holistically, as opposed to reducing the topic down to, ‘what can I do (or not do) to stay skinny?’ – and I’m finally in a place where I’m starting to understand what my body and mind truly needs each day.
Navigating through life, you try to find your voice and inner peace while the outside is so loud - ‘do this’, ‘be here’, ‘be more like this’, ‘but not too much like that’. How can I change my body and get the results that I want? You’re having a good workout routine and you’re making sure that your nutrition aligns with your goals, and yet it is not how you fully create sustainable change in your life.
Truth is I didn’t get impressive results until I started focusing my efforts to the inside. I feel like most of us are so hard on ourselves trying to improve that we don’t really give ourselves time - time to figure things out or time to change. When you’re working out you’re working on mastering tecnique and you don’t expect to get results overnight but you try your best to stay consistent, becuase you know that results will come eventually. I think that the same principle holds for every other aspect of your life - improving yourself, your relationships and building your character. But it requires to put in work an effort now, in oreder to get the benefits later. Of course there are things that will improve your life without a doubt, one of them is improving your eating habits - some foods are more nutrient and contain more fiber, vitamins and minerals and some are less nutrient dense.
Eating healthy in general is not an easy yes or no question. When I was at the peak of physical health (that also included Spirulina for breakfast) it’s easy to say I was living well, but soon I found out I was also living ignorant. Indeed, I had ignored one of the biggest aspects to come under the heading of ‘living well’: my mind and the balance it required. I learned that the approach ‘one size fits all’ was just not sustainable anymore. Just as eating one apple won’t make you healthy eathing one croissant won’t make you unhealthy. It’s how your mind approaches your food: do you blame yourself for eating things? Do you feel the need to compensate? Do you restrict yourself? Are you intuitive with your body signals? All underlying behavior that is essential when it comes to making sustainable changes to your body and getting results. If your eating habits are unhealthy you might be able to acheive your goals anyways, but… are you truly making progress?
If you really want to change your body and get results you have to change your mindset. Change the inside and the outside will follow. And though that sounds esay, that might just be the hardest part. If you are used to talking yourself down, that won’t change when you lose the extra weight you wanted to lose because you’ll still talk yourself down, you’ll still find ways to say something negatively about yourself and, as a consequence, you still won’t get stuff done.
I am not saying that I have all this figured out! I’m still learning, I am trying to develop, but as far as I’m concearned reading, journaling, spending time by yourself without being distracted by your phone and generally trying to change the narrative in your own head is what will make a difference. You have to change the narrative in your own head because your brain will become more familiar with those type of thoughts and - guess what? - it will pull those thoughts more frequently in the future, as it is more familiar with it now. It doesn’t mean that you can’t feel bad, that you cannot have bad days or struggle with it. Your struggles matter! Feel those emotions. If you don’t work through what you’re going through it will come back to you. The universe has ways of repeating the lessons that you have to learn but didn’t quite learn yet.
A metaphor of life I like to think about is ‘take care of your body and it will take care of you’. But there is another huge component to all of this, and that is your mental health. What is your relationship with food? How do you think about yourself? What do you struggle with? You never know what someone is going through or what they aren’t going through so try not to compare yourself, only try to be your own personal best and don’t try to take shortcuts, because true change comes from within. If you believe that you can do more, you will act accordingly and get more results. And if you believe that you can’t, well… mindset is key.
Excuses and lack of ownership are your biggest enemies, they are in the way of your own success. There are always ways to make it work. When gyms were closed during the pandemic, I made excuses at first but then…I kicked my own butt and started training at home, not to lose but to build. And guess what? I loved it. I used to hate training at home but during that time, instead of making excuses, it made me feel stronger than I’ve ever felt.
So believe me when I tell you that if you truly want to change your body and get results, make sure you start from the inside.
TAKE TIME TO EXPLORE WHAT WORKS FOR YOU
Once you started to master your mindset and you feel more connected with yourself, you can take time to explore what works for you.
Remember, just because your best friends might think crossfit will completly change your phisical apparence or thinks you’d be a complete fool to give up pilates, she doesn’t know your body like you do, so tune into what your body is asking for first. For me, it’s only when I stopped sticking to just one form of exercise that fitness switched from being something I felt I had to do, to something that my body and mind genuinely craved. Feeling hormonal or anxious? Hello yoga. Wanting to conquer the world? A good day to lifting weights! Craving fresh air? Grab the trainers and go.
Sometimes you might understand that maybe the magic that you’re looking for is in the work you’re avoiding. This is about working out but is also about not working out. Let me explain better..
Our greatest growth often comes from the task that we resist the most, whether it is a challenging project, a hard workout or even confronting our own fears. True transformation begins when we step out of our comfort zone. For example, in my personal fitness journey, I used to hate doing cardio - it was though, time consuming, sometimes boring and mostly, I wasn’t good at it. But then I realized something crucial: I wouldn’t come great without going through a learning phase. My goals are big, I wanted to feel my fittest and best self and that meant facing the work that I was avoiding. So I made a plan, I stuck to it and, gradually, I began to enjoy it. And that is the magic of embracing the challenge.
So ask yourself ‘what are you avoiding? What challenge seems too big to face?’ Again this is about working out and this is also about not working out, because with every challenge lies your greatest opportunity for growth.
I found out that with changing seasons or navigating stressful periods in your life there’s 3 things that are the foundation for daily success.
The first one is a Physical Win. Since a lot of us are either behind a computer screen, behind a phone or just sitting for most of the day, a single phisycal win for the day can be either a walk, a stretching session, some dancing, yoga or a hard, pumping home workout. It doesn’t matter what form of movement it is but something to respect and to fuel your body with.
The second thing is a Mental Win. This can be reading a chapter of a book, writing in your journal, learning something new. This is just about stimulationg your mind, feeding your curiosity and expanding your horizons.
And then finally, a Spiritual Win. This might be a few minutes of meditation, a prayer or reflectiong on your personal growth. It’s about connecting with your inner self, finding inner peace and nourturing your spirit.
Your future is hidden in your daily routine. It’s the small and consistent steps that we take every single day that shape our lives. A good day leads to a good week, to a good month, to a good season, to a good year and, ultimately, to a good life. Embrace the power of daily action and watch how it will transform your world.
And as you continue on this journey remember that self-improvement is an ongoing process. It’s about learning from the challenges and just striving to be a better, kinder or more patient version of yourself and everyday is a new opportunity to create magic, to grow and to connect. Because challenges are not just obstacles but stepping stones to our personal growth.
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