{"id":4903,"date":"2014-06-04T12:04:54","date_gmt":"2014-06-04T16:04:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/caitlinburke.com\/?p=4903"},"modified":"2014-06-04T12:04:54","modified_gmt":"2014-06-04T16:04:54","slug":"i-wish-i-could-but","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/caitlinburke.com\/blog\/2014\/06\/04\/i-wish-i-could-but\/","title":{"rendered":"I wish I could, but &#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><b>What&#8217;s your excuse?<\/b><\/p>\n<p>I have a love\/hate relationship with this question. How does it help people to act like not &#8220;eating clean and training dirty&#8221; &#8211; or whatever someone is evangelizing right now &#8211; means they must be lazy whiners? Whenever we fail to do something we know we should do, but can&#8217;t seem to manage, there is a reason. Yes, <b>there are some excuses, and some reasons are worse than others, but people who fail to act usually do detect a genuine obstacle of some kind<\/b>. Here are some examples:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;Nothing works &#8211; I know, because I&#8217;ve tried a bunch of stuff.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Honestly I&#8217;m not sure how to start &#8211; everything I read says that I could get injured doing X or &#8216;ruin my metabolism&#8217; doing Y. What to believe?&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;It&#8217;s truly a struggle to get up earlier, and by the end of the day I&#8217;m totally run down.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;I have to work around an injury, and it&#8217;s frustrating on top of hard.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;If I&#8217;m serious about getting in shape, I have to go to the gym 3 or 4 times a week, and I can&#8217;t make that commitment.&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>None of these are very good reasons, but they are real. The fitness industry is chock full of bizarre claims and crazy promises, and high-circulation magazines are under pressure to offer simplistic answers with lots of variety &#8211; not harping on the tried and true every month. And there&#8217;s no money in the boring, yet effective, messages of better health, so even when health agencies and other groups try to get the information out, their efforts are underfunded. <\/p>\n<p>Another complication: <b>because people have such a wide variety of preferences and obstacles, it can be hard to know how to match them up with the information that will help them most<\/b>. &#8220;I can&#8217;t seem to lose this pudge&#8221; could be down to very different needs:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>How to tell the difference between snake oil and evidence-based recommendations &#8211; or even get just a base of good health information<\/li>\n<li>How to start small, as with simple home exercises that will put them on the right track &#8211; and help give them the energy to try more <\/li>\n<li>How to find a gym that is convenient to home or work &#8211; or even how to choose a gym in the first place<\/li>\n<li>How to keep good track of what they are eating &#8211; enough information to make good decisions and easy enough to stick with<\/li>\n<li>How to exercise in a way that supports their goals without making them feel like they are being punished<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>If those high-circulation magazines thought deeply about all the different details that go into the millions of ways to combine healthy food and different forms of exercise, they&#8217;d never run out of truly useful information to share. But it still couldn&#8217;t be teased as well on the cover as &#8220;DROP A DRESS SIZE IN 7 DAYS,&#8221; &#8220;KILLER ABS,&#8221; or &#8220;BUILD A BUTT THAT DEFIES GRAVITY.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><b>The next time you catch yourself thinking, &#8220;Ugh, this person should just get out of a chair once in a while,&#8221; try asking something simple, like, &#8220;Well, what&#8217;s the toughest hurdle to getting started?&#8221;<\/b> You may be able to help them figure out something that now seems so second-nature to you that you&#8217;ve forgotten that you had to learn it somewhere, too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What&#8217;s your excuse? I have a love\/hate relationship with this question. How does it help people to act like not &#8220;eating clean and training dirty&#8221; &#8211; or whatever someone is evangelizing right now &#8211; means they must be lazy whiners? Whenever we fail to do something we know we should do, but can&#8217;t seem to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4903","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fitness","category-nutrition-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4OKzG-1h5","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/caitlinburke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4903","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/caitlinburke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/caitlinburke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/caitlinburke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/caitlinburke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4903"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/caitlinburke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4903\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/caitlinburke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/caitlinburke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/caitlinburke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}