The Blood Sugar Solution 10-Day Detox Diet: Activate Your Body's Natural Ability to Burn Fat and Lose Weight Fast (33 page)

If you’ve been resisting exercise, you’re not alone. Eighty-eight percent of all Americans don’t get enough exercise. But your body is growing stronger and healthier with each passing day on the detox, so now is a good time to look inward and explore what might be getting in the way of your getting moving.

So many of us have deeply held beliefs about our ability (or more often, inability) to exercise. Some of these beliefs were hatched early in life, through messages we received. One 10-Day Detoxer named Angela, who had had childhood asthma, had spent her entire young life on the sidelines or relegated to only the most boring of physical activities. While the rest of her class did physical education, Angela was sent alone and humiliated to ride a stationary bike in the athletic training room. She grew up with a belief that “I can’t do anything that involves physical activity.” Boy, what a bummer of a belief!

By the time she hit her forties, Angela’s weight had ballooned to 267 pounds. She had lower back pain, knee pain, and swollen ankles, all of which required her to walk up stairs at a creep, pausing with each step instead of taking them one after another. It hurt just to get in and out of a chair. As Angela put it, “I felt physically uncomfortable all the time. Pain and discomfort were my normal—and I was ready to let them go. The exercise part of the 10-Day Detox plan actually concerned me more than the food changes. I knew it all worked together to heal—the food and exercise and other means of self-care. And that’s what I wanted, enough so that I was willing to do it.”

So Angela shifted her negative belief to “I can find a physical activity that will work for me.” She put on a pair of sneakers and for the first time started walking on a regular basis. She stuck to it—no excuses (and this was January in Minnesota!). One step after another, Angela
literally walked away from her self-sabotaging beliefs and into a healthier mind-set. Two months later, she wrote to me, “I’ve still got a long way to go, but for today I feel so much better than I did less than two months ago. My body moves easier and sleeps better. Instead of taking me fifteen minutes to walk from the parking ramp to my office at work, now it only takes ten minutes. I might still be large on the outside, but inside I feel like a supermodel. And with all this energy to burn, I found an exercise I absolutely love—water aerobics. It’s so much fun! And it’s easy on my joints and has no impact on my asthma. I actually look forward to water aerobics and go three times a week. That is truly miraculous to me.”

We are all busy with the demands of work and family, and many of us believe we simply don’t have time to exercise. Yet Americans somehow find two spare hours a day to spend browsing the Internet. We spend more time watching cooking on television than we do exercising, and certainly more time watching sports than doing physical activity ourselves.

In my lectures, I often share a funny cartoon. It shows a doctor saying to his patient, “What fits your busy schedule better, exercising one hour a day or being dead twenty-four hours a day?”

When it comes to exercise, little bits do count. Something is always better than nothing! Just the act of taking more steps every day is great. Park farther away from work. Take stairs instead of elevators or escalators. Get a step counter (like a FitBit) and have competitions with friends, family, or coworkers to get to 10,000 steps a day. Or just wear your step counter every day; when you quantify your steps, you’re motivated to take more. Find a friend to walk with. Or walk around in circles when you’re on the phone!

Strive to fit in exercise wherever and whenever you can. If you look for opportunities, you’ll find them. When I’m on the road, I always bring a pair of running shoes so I can go out for a quick thirty-minute run between commitments. I recently found a new seven-minute interval-training workout that I can almost always fit in right when I
get out of bed, or before having dinner or going out (see the box
here
for more about interval training). It just takes a little planning and intention.

One of the best ways to get yourself moving is to set up the triggers in your life that make it easy to do the right thing. I hate push-ups but realize I need to do them if I want to keep my upper body toned and strong. So I decided to do them right before I get in the shower. Since I shower every day, I am always reminded to do my push-ups, which take less than a minute. Simple, automatic, and easy (well, easy to remember, still hard to do!). It has made a huge difference for me. I started with ten push-ups and can now do forty to fifty at a time.

If Angela can overcome her exercise hurdles, you can overcome yours. All you need are some strategies for releasing your limiting beliefs around exercise as well as real, proven ways to motivate yourself. Read on.