20 Biggest Health Excuses That Hold You Back

This article was posted on my Facebook news feed (I don't remember by whom...Active.com, maybe? Anyway, I thought it was pretty interesting and worth sharing.

20 Biggest Health Excuses That Hold You Back

It's so easy to come up with excuses why we don't want to eat healthy, go to the gym, etc. but in the end we're just hurting ourselves by doing (or not doing, as the case may be) those things. No one else cares if you make it to the gym or sneak a bag of Cheetos. I'm fairly certain that if you have an excuse for not doing something health/fitness related, it's covered in this article and therefore worth reading.

I love reason #2 about craving something sweet. There's nothing wrong with eating something sweet and no reason to deny yourself that if it's what your body wants, but be smart about your choices. There are healthy sweets out there...it doesn't have to be a box of Twinkies or a pint of ice cream. Same with #12...I'm a firm believer in everything in moderation. It does no good to completely deny myself something because then when I let myself have it chances are I'm going balls to the wall with it. If I let myself have a little bit of something on occasion, I satisfy the craving but won't go completely overboard with it. In fact, my whole "moderation" mentality came about my freshman year of college. There was cake in the dining hall EVERY NIGHT. I love cake. But eventually I didn't love what it was doing to me, so if I wanted cake, I'd take a piece and have a bite and leave it at that. Or more often a friend and I would share a piece and each take a bite or two so as to not be completely wasteful about it. I managed to avoid the dreaded "freshman 15" with my simple moderation strategy.

As for exercising, I find it's so much easier if I do it with a friend. I'm less likely to quit or phone it in, and they'll help push me when I want to quit. honestly I rarely work out alone. I much prefer to run with Jen than I do by myself, and when I go to the gym I have 3-4 friends (depending on the day) that I work out with. Two of them come up with awesome workouts for us to do that are tough and challenging and really really sucky, but they work. And they don't let me quit. Okay, sometimes Michelle lets me slide on some of the ab work using the Swiss ball that I'm flat out just not coordinated enough to pull off on my own, but that doesn't mean I just sit there while the rest of them exercise--I do something similar that won't potentially have me rolling off the ball and breaking a limb.

If you read the article feel free to leave a comment with your thoughts on it. Do you have a particular excuse that keeps you from doing something you know you should be doing? What can you do to work past the excuse and really get down to it?