My Journey With Health And Fitness – Finding Motivation

At our condo in Mexico we have well water. That means all of the water coming in is not only extremely hard but it is full of minerals we don’t see in our water at home. Because of this all glassware tends to be cloudy and appliance using water frequently needs descaling. And so today, even though I just did this 3 weeks ago, I descaled both the electric kettle and the coffee maker. It’s not that difficult to do, I simply boil the kettle with diluted vinegar then run a water boil a couple times to rinse it. The same with the coffee maker, first run a pot through it with the diluted vinegar then twice with just water. This method works every time though I will note we still have to replace the coffee maker every couple years because the humidity here significantly corrodes the heating plate.

Sometimes I admit I need to find motivation to get moving in the morning. Don’t get me wrong, most days the alarm goes off and I am out of bed starting my routine without a moment’s thought. Please remember that at home by 9:00am I have usually done 3 hours of some sort of exercise. I do back off a bit while here but still most days by 8:30am I have put in 2.5 hours of exercise. Some days I can even convince my husband to join me with a walk to get to that 3 hours of exercise.

However, there are those days where I just want to go back to sleep and today was one of those. We had been out last night with some of our good friends and by time we got home it was later than normal for us. That, of course, meant a later bedtime that what I am used to. I had decided to let myself sleep in for an extra 1/2 hour. This is easy to arrange without resetting my electronics, I leave the alarm at the normal time but I always have a backup alarm on my Fitbit set for 15 minutes later just in case. When that alarm went off I simply hit snooze a couple times (something I really don’t often do). But I lay there in bed thinking will it really make that much difference if I skip today?

I was truly thinking of just back to sleep when it suddenly hit me, the cats. Yes those cats around the complex that I feed whenever I go for a walk would be missing out if I stayed in bed. While a few of these cats I know are pets, 5 that I regularly feed are obviously feral. Knowing that I will not be walking tomorrow I thought about how they would be going 2 days possibly without food and I just couldn’t take that so out of bed I got. I should note that instead of the normal 1 1/2 hour walk I cut it short just 1 hour because thunder and lightening had started and I didn’t want a repeat of last Saturday.

I get that feeding cats might not motivate a lot of other people but it truly was that incentive I needed to get out of bed this morning. I do have other things that normally motivate me when I am home including just not willing to lose my fitness level or needing the workout to clear my head. When I am signed up for a fitness class my motivation is that I don’t want to disappoint the instructor by canceling on them. And sometimes going for my walks just gives me time to be by myself for a couple hours.

And so each day find your motivation to get yourself moving. Your motivation may be entirely different than someone else’s but really that is how it should be. No matter what it is, if it keeps you going, keep using it.