Keep Going!

Okay, here's the reason I had you read about stimulants and detoxification.

If dieting and eating healthy is new to you, your body will be trying to assimilate different habits.  If you're suddenly trying to drink enough water after years of dehydration, your body will actually feel worse before it feels better.  If your body is used to a sedentary lifestyle, and you go out for that first one-miler, you will probably come home winded and feeling like you're going to puke.  (Believe me, I did!)  If you start exercising and the sweat causes rashes on your skin, you may be tempted to quit.  (This happened to me.)  If you drink two cans of diet coke a day, and decide to stop because it's an unhealthy stimulant, you will crash and have major withdrawals.  If you start eating five fruits and vegetables a day, or cut out refined sugars, you may feel sick and tired, even like you have the flu.

All these things are going to make you want to say, "I'm doing the right thing and I feel worse!  It must not be the right thing to do.  I'll go back to what I was doing before because I felt better."

DON'T DO IT!

Everyone knows that to break a drug or alcohol addiction, you must go through some withdrawal.  The worse the addiction, the more painful the withdrawal will be.  But is that a reason to tell that poor person who is addicted to drugs, "Well, the withdrawal doesn't feel good, so we must be doing it wrong.  Go back to the drugs and see if you feel better." No.

It is my opinion that this is why many dieters quit early into their routine.  They hit the detox phase, and it's uncomfortable, so they return to what they were doing before instead of plowing ahead to life without addictions and stimulants, to a healthy body with natural energy that works the way it should.

So my tip of the day is, keep going!  Don't let that little wall stop you--the grass really IS greener on the other side.  Yes, it's tough to change old habits, and there's definitely physical resistance as well as the mental inertia to fight.  But fight!  Keep going!   Your body will eventually hit the stage where it has broken through all that--where it has cleansed, detoxed, reached the "breakthrough point," and it'll feel so good!  The technical term for it in German is Körperdummanschlagenzeit, or "the time when your body stops being stupid."

That one was for you, Sherry :)