#308: Where is Your Alligator?

I ran across a newspaper cartoon that showed a drill sergeant speaking to his basic training recruits about using a rope to swing across an open pit.

“That there is a rope,” he said, pointing at the rope. “That there is a pit,” he said, pointing to the mud-filled pit. “And that,” he said, pointing to an alligator in the pit, “is your incentive.”

It got me wondering about our incentives for our weight loss and fitness journeys. Was it for improved health, for improved personal appearance or better fitness and mobility? Whatever our incentive to begin, where is our incentive now? Have we maintained sight of it? Or, discovering that this is not an overnight success trip, have we lost it?

With most aspects of our lives, it is difficult to be "up" every minute of every day. Sure, being positive should be a bedrock of our mental foundation, but there is only so much emotion in us. When we first begin a task, we are so very gung-ho and our excitment level is at an all-time high. Then, as long-term reality sets in we sometimes find our motivation, our incentive, our enthusiasm, waning.

So what do we do then?

I suggest we go back to the beginning and remember how excited we were when we set up our SparkPeople profile page, then joined several groups and began adding friends. When these down times hit, let's go back to the basics and recall how inspired we were when fellow members started posting comments to our page and sending us Goodies and words of encouragement. Let's go back to the start of our journey when we asked for help and received caring words of support from others in return.

Then, let's see where we are now. Have we lost ANY weight? Are we more educated about nutrition and fitness because of reading all of the site's articles, blogs and posts? Do ANY of our clothes feel looser? Have we received ANY compliments on our appearance? Has our mobility improved? Has our confidence increased?

Yes, it is easy to view the rope that will swing us across the chasm of where we started to where we want to go but let's not lose sight of the reasons we embarked on our journey in the first place.

Let us not lose sight of our alligators.