Exit Your Comfort Zone
Last week I left my kickboxing class breathless after over fifty burpees to end the class. This is certainly not something I enjoy though I love the class as a whole. I kept pushing myself partly because others were doing it so why shouldn’t I be able to keep up? (That concept of group dynamics that makes our competitive edge surge). Also because it’s a challenging activity for me. I want to get out of the comfort of easy runs and perfunctory gym visits that used to be my mainstay for activity. My point is, though conventional wisdom points us in a direction to find an activity that you love and therefore will stick with it, parts of what your'e doing in your training, may not invoke 100% love…do it anyway, push yourself out of this comfort zone! Sometimes this is necessary to get yourself out of a rut, to the next level of fitness. And who knows, I may end up loving burpees some day!
With regards to nutrition, it’s the same thing, we can become set in our ways as adults with many things and this holds true for our eating patterns as well. We stick to what we know EVEN when we learn or figure out its likely sabotaging our health goals. Cracking the code as to why we do this warrants a much larger discussion into the fascinating world of our brains, but for today let’s start small.
What if we never encouraged our kids to eat different foods, what if they were stuck in mac and cheese land forever without exploring new things? It took me many, many years as an adult to develop a taste for olives and now I love them. You never know what you may end up loving if you never try.
I encourage you to push yourself out of your comfort zone with food this week, try something new (jicama? mustard greens? seaweed?), look up a recipe, ask a friend for their favorite new dish, if that tastes awful, try something else. In breaking out of our comfort zones we allow ourselves to open up to the world of limitless possibilities! It can be life changing to steer your path in a new direction by taking a chance on a new food or activity. It may at first feel uncomfortable but as you progress your mind will build new pathways for joy and acceptance of things you never thought possible.
Ill wrap up with this quote by Henry Ford; “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got”.
How will you push the limits of your comfort zone this week? What new food will you try?
While you’re at it try a burpee – tell me what you think!