The steps to being “healthy” are incredibly simple, and yet the follow through seems nearly impossible.
Step one: Spend all of your money on workout clothes, meal prep containers, and a complete grocery haul from Whole Foods.
Step two: Follow a ton of fitness accounts across a range of social media platforms, feeling an endless stream of motivation flow through you, thinking “Yes, now I can *finally* kick-start my fitness journey.”
Step three: Go to the gym.
Then, as it often happens, step four rears its ugly head: You fall off the wagon. You stop going to the gym, your “once in a while” treat meal becomes an everyday ritual, and now you’re only wearing your Lululemon leggings on the days you don’t feel like squeezing into a pair of jeans.
So, what’s next? How do you successfully continue with step three and avoid hitting step four altogether? You need to realize that the physical steps of eating clean, going to the gym, and being “fit” are all just mental. The sooner you accept the fact that your mentality surrounding health and fitness needs to change, the sooner the physical results will show!
The “if you think you can, then you can; if you think you can’t, then you can’t” mentality can change a lot about how you tackle your fitness journey. Being healthy is not something that you can do once or twice a week and expect to see anything in your life change; being healthy is a lifestyle choice that you have to actively embrace every day, regardless of how hard it might be. That is the first thing you need to remember when you feel like you’re swiftly approaching step four territory. You need to flex your will-power, not just your muscles. The truth is a hard pill to swallow, and that pill is rather aggressively labeled “suck it up.” If you want to keep up with your health, the truth is, you’re going to have to just go to the gym, regardless of how tired, sore, or unmotivated you feel. While rest and recovery days are necessary, one every single day of the week is not. It *is* tough to get up and drag yourself to the gym when you are unmotivated, sore, tired, or even a combination of all three, but *that’s* when the real progress is made. To truly be healthy takes as much, if not more, mental energy as it does physical energy. You need to train yourself to say that you don’t care how tired you are. 
Hypothetically speaking, of course, changing your attitude about something isn’t necessarily the easiest thing to do, however it is the most important if you want to see genuine results. Breaking through the first round of a lack in motivation is one of the biggest steps in a fitness journey, because if you can convince yourself to push through and still continue putting in the work, continuing this healthy lifestyle will almost become second nature. And truthfully, those first few weeks into this lifestyle change are all you have to fight through; once you form a habit out of going and once you find delicious and healthy foods you actually like to eat, you won’t want to stop. The gym will become your safe-haven. A bowl of strawberries will look more appetizing than a donut. This once seemingly impossible feat will become an everyday occurrence—you just have to fight to make it one.