Day 52 This isn't a race...

The other day I was looking over my friends' posts on MFP & there was one by this girl who was really frustated because she'd been "at it for a while now" & had only lost 8 lbs.  She was frustrated by her lack of loss with the amount of time & effort she had been putting into losing the weight, and man can I identify!  Every other time I've tried to lose this weight I've just wanted to see immediate results.  It's that mindset of "I'm going to do this for this amount of time so that I can lose this amount of weight" & you make the changes & wait for the "miracle" to happen but the truth is, there is no miracle, and honestly that sucks!!  We all want the magic pill, I know I do, but it's that thinking right there that stops so many people from succeeding at weight loss.  We want it to be fast & easy. We want it SO bad, but we're not willing to do the work to get us there and it gets frustrating.  But this time I came to the realization that it's not about how fast I get there, it's really not even about the final destination, it's about the journey.  This whole thing is about making itsy bitsy, teeny tiny changes in our lives that will add up to a big loss down the road.  It's about chosing diet pepsi over Hi-C, it's about bringing your lunch to school/work instead of eating at the cafeteria, it's about doing that 20 minute work out video, instead of watching that hour long tv program.  It's little changes that we can & will make for the rest of our lives that will add up to US being changed in the end.  Our choices will change, our bodies will change & in the interim our lives will change. We'll look back on the road behind us & realize that we never gave up & we made it to where we wanted to be. We made it to our "new" selves, and all we have to do from there is to keep going & by then it will be easy because we've been doing it for so long.  You see that's why the road has to be long.  We have to make real changes & real changes take time to incorporate into your life. Real changes take a while to "take hold".  So if we were to be able to snap our fingers & lose the weight in 1 month, what would we have learned?  Not a darn thing & a month or two later we'd be right back where we started because we wouldn't have LEARNED the things we needed to learn to make this a LIFELONG change.  New habits have to be FORMED to replace old ones & we've all heard that it takes 30 days to either make or break a habit.  How many habits do you think you need to break? How many new habits do you need to form?  Well give yourself the TIME to do that!  It's not a race, it's a journey of 1000 miles & we're getting there step by step.