Remember when you were 11 years old in middle school and everything felt incredibly awkward and hard?  The day to day anxiety of avoiding bullies, struggling to understand your algebra class, and crossing your fingers mom would let you go get the new ‘popular’ pair of jeans everyone was wearing?

We call these growing pains.

I look back at middle school and think about how hard of a time it was for me.  I was growing out of my ‘little girl’ mentality and transitioning into becoming a teenager.  It was a constant state of discomfort, always feeling like I was putting in so much effort and not getting much in return – like I was moving so slowly for how much that was happening on a daily basis.

This is the same discomfort many experience with lifestyle change.

We are not yet grown into our new ‘selves’ yet we are not yet separated from our old selves.  It is the pain of leaving one part of our lives behind and the excitement/agynst of embracing a new part.  It feels very much like middle school in that way.  Except the advantage is that now we know we are in control of how we feel because we are emotionally intelligent adults and can choose our own perspectives.

These growing pains are because we no longer ‘fit’ with many old parts of our lives.  Old beliefs no longer resonate with us and old situations no longer serve us because we see things differently now.  We see that our old habits and ways of living were not bringing us the lives we desired or the feelings about ourselves we wanted.

It’s important that we understand these day-to-day growing pains are just situations that challenge you to ask yourself:

And isn’t it sort of awesome that you can answer this question by choosing the long-term goal and kicking that short term challenge in the face?!  I think yes.

Here’s a List of 5 Interactive Strategies to Overcome Growing Pains:

Just start by adding one of these things into your life in the next 10 days, and take note of how it positively affects you.  The more good you can add into your life, the better you will feel about yourself and the more easily adhering to this new lifestyle will be.

Surface solutions rarely fix the problem; which is why we are constantly asking you to look a bit deeper.

Your health is connected to every area of your life therefore, we can’t compartmentalize ourselves by looking at nutrition/training so separately.  You know by now that your reasons for maintaining compliance (see Coaching Module 14) or not complying seldom have to do with the program itself, but with the events that occur in your life outside of nutrition and exercise.