I’ve never had that one moment.
That a-ha moment that made me completely change my lifestyle on a dime and lose huge amounts of weight.
I used to think there was going to be one.
That “Ohhh – I was supposed to turn left at the stop sign” kind of direction.
Where something ‘clicked’ in my head and, like magic, I would just change my life around and start losing weight.
Everyone seemed to have it.
Oprah ‘made the connection’.
Commercials for weight loss products had clients saying this was the one thing that made them lose weight.
Fitness pundits on the internet promised if I just did that one workout/one diet/one thing each day that it would be the answer for me.
So I kept looking for my one moment.
Where everything would fall into place and I would change my life.
But I never had it.
I would have insights about different things. Why I ate something when I wasn’t hungry or why I skipped my workout.
But when I didn’t keep up the momentum and backtracked, I told myself that must not have been THE connection I needed to make.
Waiting for the one is nerve-racking.
Was that it? No…
That one? No…
How about this? Ugh!
What did happen was the stress of waiting for that one moment that would change everything.
Then the upset that come when the moment I did find turned out not to be ‘the one’.
We have this idea that there is The One.
One love
One passion
One career that’s right for us
One moment that turns everything around.
And nothing else quite measures up.
I would get so frustrated because I wanted that one thing to come along and make it all happen for me.
After a few rounds of telling myself that an insight wasn’t good enough, I got real with myself.
I called my own bullshit.
(Something I do regularly and highly recommend.)
The ‘one moment’ that people talk about is a myth.
This idea of ‘The One’ limits us tremendously.
It puts a glass ceiling over our heads.
It stops our growth.
There is not just one moment.
There are lots of moments.
Layers of moments. Each connecting to the next like a daisy chain that propels us forward.
That’s the beauty of it.
You don’t just decide once that you are going to change your life. You decide once, and then you decide again and decide again…and again…
You keep deciding as you move forward through the easy times and the tough times. Not valuing one a-ha more thank another. Just learning from each one and letting that be enough until your next one.
This is one of the best lessons I have learned.
Because it allowed me to value the moments that I do have, without discounting them.
And I know that, as long as I let them, my a-ha moments will keep coming.
I’m so glad there wasn’t that one moment that changed everything for me.
(And I call bullshit on anyone why says there was.)
I love that I keep having life changing moments that deepen my understanding of why I gained weight and how to keep losing it.
All of these moments strengthen my connection to myself.
I’m so thankful I stopped looking for The One.
Because I want as many as I can get.
