Albert Einstein is often cited as saying insanity is:

“…doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

When it comes to my fitness routine, I’ve been doing the same thing, over and over again, and never got the types of results that I wanted. No matter how hard I worked out, I never noticed any change in my body or my strength. But that ignores the fact that after a couple of weeks of getting nowhere, my trips to the gym became less frequent or that I was still eating pizza and drinking soda.

I also never had a plan. There was no routine in my routine. I’d do cardio until I was drenched in sweat, and if I felt like lifting weights, I’d hit the machines scattered around the gym. I didn’t track how much weight I was lifting, or how many reps were in my sets. I had no way of knowing whether I was improving from one week to the next. Without the numbers, I had no way of pushing myself to do better…I didn’t know what better was.

And then came the excuses I mentioned the other day. It’s my body, not my effort…blah, blah, blah.

I struggle with changing my life just the same as anyone else, and I make the same excuses. I make choices that conflict with my goals. I’ll sit on the couch in front of the TV, eating a bowl of ice cream with a serving spoon. Instead of preparing a healthy breakfast, I’ll eat Cocoa Puffs. Rather than drinking water, I grab a Pepsi. For some reason, I’ve felt immune to the effects that eating this way will have (and has had) on my body. I treat my mouth like a dumpster. And even though I’m trying to change, I still make a lot of poor decisions when it comes to my diet.

The other day, I asked what you were going to do about your life. Are you going to do something to change the shit in your life that’s bringing you down, or are you just going to keep making excuses? I’ve decided that I’m going to change, and the first thing I’m going to focus on is diet and exercise.

Instead of walking into the gym without any sort of plan, I’ve spent a lot of hours researching exercise plans. My hope is to use these plans to track my progress in the gym, and with that information, push myself to improve week after week. If you want to find a fitness plan for yourself, check out this link. If you’re a lady, and you’re worried that lifting weights will make you look like this keep in mind that there are plenty of female lifters who look like Rachel Mac.

As for my diet, I’m also changing that. No more pizza and soda. I’ll be eating a Clean Diet that’s high in protein and complex carbs…and water. Lots of water! I quit drinking soda on the 4th of July, and even though I’ve cheated a few times, I haven’t had a drop of soda in about a week.

It’s still early in the process, but all change has to start somewhere.

I’ll ask you again, what are you going to do about it? Are you going to keep making excuses, or are you going to make changes?