Healthy Sexy Mommy Challenge (Part 2): Finding the time to exercise

“I’m okay, my weight really isn’t all that bad.”

“I’m not getting sick so I must be healthy.”

“I don’t have money for gym membership.”

“I don’t have exercise equipment at home.”

Do these lines sound familiar to you?

I have used at least one of these excuses before to justify why I didn’t exercise.

But the top excuse on my list must be something that’s on your list too:

I don’t have the time.

During weekdays, I told myself that I was tired at work and that I was better off sleeping.

During weekends, I told myself that it was my only break during the week and I would be better off resting.

So I made myself believe that I didn’t have the time.

But the truth was, I did not have the time because I did not want to set aside time for exercise.

It wasn’t just because I was feeling lazy, it was because I didn’t feel like exercising was important to me.

Think about it, don’t we always set aside time for the things that are important to us? Or at the very least, for things that we want to do?

So how do you find the time for exercise?

1. Decide that exercise is important to you.

Before I decided to launch this personal challenge, I needed to ask myself why it was important to me.

I need to get healthy and sexy because:

I want to feel good about myself.

I want to be strong to do anything I wanted.

I want to wear anything I wanted with confidence.

I want to be a better version of me.

I also realized that it just wasn’t about me.

I want to be pleasing to my hubby as I was before.

I want to be a pretty and sexy wife just as I intended to be.

I want to be strong so I can keep up with the demands of taking care of my babies.

All of the reasons above convinced me enough that I needed to make the time to accomplish this challenge no matter what.

2. Choose a realistic time frame.

I used to target two hours of exercise every day of the week. I thought then I should dive right in and work really, really hard at it. But I ended up getting burned out and tired. After keeping it up for a couple of days, I gave up my exercise routine altogether.

So this time around, I chose to start with a more realistic time frame: 20 minutes every day of the week.

Twenty minutes can go by pretty fast. When I observed my morning habits, I usually spend 20 minutes just trying to get up from the bed!

Imagine how much good it will do me if I will spend those 20 minutes working out.

Twenty minutes may not sound much, but it’s okay to start small because it will build up and produce the big result I want.

After all, 20 minutes of daily exercise is better than no exercise at all.

3. Minimize the time wasters.

I always told myself that I had no time for exercise.

But I had time for watching TV, net surfing, blogging, plurking and more net surfing.

Sure I enjoy doing these things. In a way, they are like therapy for me and they are a bit necessary to keep my sanity.

But in the bigger scheme of my goals, these activities don’t really help me to achieve one of my important goals: my health and fitness.

In fact, doing these make me stay up late, sleep late, wake up late and the “no time” cycle goes on and on.

So I cut the time I spent on net surfing and watching TV in the evening.

And this is how my schedule looked like:

• 10:00 pm = sleep time
• 6:45 am = Wake up!
• 7:00 am = Pilates work out
• 7:30 am = Start getting ready for work

It’s up to you if you want to do your exercise in the morning, during your lunch break or in the evening.

For me though, exercising right after I wake up in the morning works best because it’s easier to do it before I do anything else.

One time I skipped exercise in the morning thinking I can do it in the middle of the day. But the middle of the day became early afternoon..late afternoon… early evening… you get it.

Besides, when I exercise in the morning, I feel so much more accomplished knowing that I’ve already completed one goal for the day.

A final note

The truth? It’s difficult but DOABLE.

If you’ve been sedentary for a long time like me, getting back into the fitness groove is not easy.

I originally intended to start this challenge last July 1 but I found enough excuses to start it a week later.

When I finally started last week, I kept it up for four days before I skipped exercise from Friday to Monday.

I was tempted to just give up and ditch the whole thing. I felt like I failed and I was back to square one.

A pesky voice was telling me: “Give up, you just can’t do it.”

But then I remembered the reasons why accomplishing this challenge is important to me.

So here I am trying again.

If you’ve been exercising and you’ve hit a slump, I say:

Just keep going.

All your efforts amount to something so just pick up where you left off. Every little bit of exercise you do will build one on top of the other. And you’ll accomplish your goal before you know it.

If you haven’t started exercising yet, face the facts and find the time now:

1. Decide why fitness is important to you.
2. Set a realistic time frame.
3. Minimize your time wasters.

My progress

I’ve accomplished my 20-minute Pilates workout for 2 days in a row this week.

My back pain has disappeared and my posture is a bit better.

I have more energy throughout the day and I can walk up and down the stairs a bit easier.

I’m just taking it one day at a time.

How do you find the time to exercise? If you don’t what’s stopping you?

Posted in: Fit and fabulous

Tags: fitness, health, how to be a sexy mommy, how to find time for exercise, time for exercise, weight loss

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 17th, 2008 at 11:49 pm and is filed under Fit and fabulous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.