First day carrying out my new mantra

So... I just exercised. Thirty minutes of intense activity. It was so exhilarating and it felt so good!! The thing about exercise is that I make it worse than it actually is. I think I've set the standard so high that I couldn't follow it, so I considered myself a failure. About two years ago, I was obsessed with the gym; I was consistent for a whole year. My plan was cardio for an hour six days a week and weight lifting for an hour three times a week. I was in the gym almost everyday. It was hard to maintain, and during my finals, I stopped going. When I tried going to the gym again that was the standard, and when I couldn't do it, it was so discouraging to me that I stopped altogether. Since then, I've had trouble getting back into the mix. So today when I exercised just now, I realized what I loved about the gym a couple of years ago. It was the idea of pushing myself and the feeling I had after a workout. I didn't do the whole hour of cardio, and I didn't do the exercises I used to do, but I had fun! So the tip I can share with everyone is make exercise work for you. Pick activities that you like, not what you think is good or what you've read about. For me, I don't like doing the same exercises for long periods of time. It's just boring. What I tried today is sprinting on the treadmill until I didn't feel like it anymore, until I was bored. Then I did jump ropes or jumping jacks to keep my heart rate up. Then I would go back and sprint on the treadmill again. Because I exerted so much effort, I finished in thirty minutes. I suggest doing cardio exercises until boredom sets in and switching to another one. It makes thirty minutes go by faster. Exercise is more manageable when it's fun, so the more you like something the more you'll do it. Good luck!!!

My new mantra

I was putting on my running shoes a few seconds ago and I realized that I really do need a new mantra. I've been told that the thing that holds me back is my mindset. For my whole life I've been so scared of failure that my mantra has been "why bother?" I tried to find what mantra will inspire me to action, and at first I thought it should be "Do or do not. There is no try." But then I realized that maybe I don't want a mantra that is supposed to inspire me to action when said words of inspiration are spoken by Yoda. These words are profound... but it actually backfired on me. I opted for "do not." So as I was lacing up my faded running sh0es, I heard a voice in my head and it said: "No excuses." This is me in a nutshell. I'll spend an hour in my head thinking of all the reasons I can't work out. I have a midterm. I have work. I have a paper. I have reading that needs done. In that hour that I've outlined all the reasons I can't, I've done absolutely nothing, not even one thing from the list of things that need to be done. So today when I was getting ready to do my exercises, I thought "I have no excuses." It's a lie I tell myself when I say I don't have time to exercises because the truth of the matter is, I waste so much time doing nothing, that this argument no longer holds up at the end of the day. I have all the excuses in the world and I need to rid my brain of all of them. So everyday when I wake up, I hold myself accountable. I'm reminded of what Bob Greene tells Oprah every new year, "Exercise is non-negotiable."