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2 Habits You Must Break

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Chris Shugart
Editor / V-Diet Author

Join date: Oct 2002
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Posts: 8970

2 Habits You Must Break:
Rationalization & Justified Procrastination

There is one concept you must internalize and make a part of your daily life if you want to succeed with the Velocity Diet or any other challenging endeavor. If you don't master this skill, you quite simply won't make a single long-term change in your body:

You must, before you even begin any physique goal, learn to recognize and squash your use of rationalization. Here's how I did it:

At age 20 I found myself sitting in a college psychology class. I was fat, out of shape, and my eating habits were out of control. But the worst part was that I'd mentally blocked all of this out of my immediate consciousness. I avoided stepping on scales, taking my shirt off at pools, and even looking in the mirror. I'd built up so many protective walls that I was walking around practically unaware of my condition -- willfully blind.

I knew of course that I was nearing the state of clinical obesity, but I chose not to think about it. I had excuses for everything: I was too busy to workout. Healthy food was expensive. Eating was a stress reliever. Heck, I deserved to eat garbage as a reward for my hard work in school. I even remember saying that I'd rather be fat and happy than lean and miserable. (In reality, I was already miserable just being overweight.)

Two things happened that day. First, I had to take a body fat test as part of a PE class. Humiliated and red faced, I took off my shirt and let some cute athletic chick try to measure my body fat percentage with a set of calipers. I was so fat she had a hard time doing it. I clearly remember her trying to pinch my rolls of belly fat with the calipers.

My face burned with embarrassment.

Later that day in a psychology class, the professor went over the concept that shattered every psychological wall I'd ever erected. That concept was known as rationalization.

Rationalization is a type of ego-defense mechanism. Basically, rationalization involves creating false but plausible excuses to justify unacceptable behavior. Essentially, you're lying to yourself to make yourself feel better or to relieve guilt.

To relieve his guilt about stealing from the office, a person may tell himself, "Well, they underpay me anyway. It's only fair." Someone may try to relieve his guilt about cheating on his girlfriend by saying, "I'd had a few beers, so I wasn't in my right mind."

When I grasped the definition of rationalization, my ego-protecting, guilt-relieving wall of lies came crashing down. Hard. And once a person grasps the concept, it's almost impossible to un-grasp it.

I saw immediately what I was doing to myself by overeating and not working out. All my excuses became transparent. I became angry and disgusted with myself. It was a hard lesson, but from that day forward I learned to recognize rationalization and put a stop to it.

Here's the power of this recognition: once you're aware of rationalization, it's very hard to keep doing it. And once you stop doing it, it's amazing how quickly you start to achieve your goals.

As with many other aspects of life, rationalization is probably the single biggest roadblock in a person's way when he or she is trying to lose fat, add muscle, get healthy, or increase performance. We always seem to have a good reason to skip a workout or eat something we know is bad for us.

We're not lying to others about why we're doing these negative things; we're lying to ourselves.

I think what broke me out of my downward spiral of rationalization was mostly the realization that what I was doing -- self-directed lying to excuse my bad diet and lack of training -- had been named and defined by a psychologist. I mean, I was doing something that negatively affected my whole life, and it had been defined and placed into psychology textbooks 100 years ago!

Again, this made it very difficult to keep doing it. The act of recognition alone helped me to stop making these thin excuses and get on with changing my behaviors.

Here are some examples of rationalization related to body-transformation:

"I had a good workout today. I can have the Chinese buffet tonight."

"I've had a tough week. I deserve a big meal."

"Celery has, like, no calories, so it's okay to have on the V-Diet."

"I'll start the diet next week or next month."

And that brings us to destructive habit #2. The latter example is a special form of rationalization I call justified procrastination. To procrastinate means to put something off until another day. Justified procrastination is when you put something off -- like starting an exercise program or a diet -- but rationalize the delay. Examples include:

"I'll start the V-Diet after my birthday (or vacation or holiday, etc.)"

"Well, let me eat up all the food in my fridge first, then I'll start the V-Diet next week."

"Lemme wait until after the weekend. I'll start on Monday."

Sometimes, there may be a real reason not to start the diet (waiting for your supplement order to arrive for example.) But for the most part, the time to start any training program or diet is now.

There is great power in immediate action. Ninety-percent of delays are merely justified procrastination, and you must learn to recognize it and squash it, along with regular rationalization.

Really internalize this today and see if you catch yourself rationalizing about things that could be keeping you from reaching your goals.