I was always someone who was guided by my emotions and instinct in relation to action. I thought that my emotions had produced so many good things in my life that I must reward these emotions by holding them as the higher barometer of my action. My emotions and feeling were the way I would measure whether something was good, whether something was right or whether something valuable. Things that my emotions didnt like therefore were bad, incorrect or invaluable (not worth doing).

But, despite thinking that I had developed the ability to look past or through my emotions, I was a complete slave to them. I thought looking through emotions simply meant understanding them…and so I became really good at that. I knew exactly how I felt at any given action because my meditation practice had built a sensitivity and knowledge where I had the scales and labels to describe how I felt. “I feel shame arising”. “I feel guilt arising”. “This is fear”. I could tell you how I felt somatically, emotionally, pyschologically. And yet, I could never really look through them. I simply had made my emotions the centre of focus.

I was fortunate and lucky enough that my emotions would motivate me intrinsically to do certain things and stop me from doing certain things. But this also meant that I had created a life which was representative of this middle path – neither good nor bad. I would eat too much followed by a few days of discipline which felt good till my emotions felt okay enough to eat too much again. I was in a constant wave of up and down. I could tell I was in a constant wave of up and down. I used to think this was normal.

Motivation is an emotion that is part of this up and down. I find that it arises naturally in me when I feel at my lowest and something naturally drives me up from the trough to the peak. The motivation would kick in just in the right time till I was over the edge of going too far and it would cause a burst of discipline to put me on the path to hitting an aritificial peak I had created for me. This applied to a lot of things not just my health and exercise. I would be lazy for days and then be hit with a burst of motivation to start tasks followed by laziness again.

I used to think such waves were discipline and that I was disciplined. Any faults in the discipline I would just excuse as blips or simply find a reason to justify the fault – “i’ve been working too hard so I deserve this”, “im only young once and this is freedom”, “I have a lot of time to fix this up”. But, in reality it cannot be freedom if I am bound to my emotions.

It was not until I looked around in my life, looked around at the way time had passed and realised that nothing was improving in my life. These waves of discpline and indulgence would just leave me in the same spot over a number of weeks, months, years. And yet I was spending so much time learning how to discipline myself, how to acheive my goals, spending time in pursuit of the goals and spending time in punishing myself for failing. I had nothing to show for the extended periods of time I had spent in attempting to become better. And as a result, I had wasted time which I could have simply rested. In all honesty, the body I had achieved after 6 years of gym was something I could have achieved in 1 year preceded by 5 years of rest and having fun.

After 6 years of going to the gym and reaching no results, I humbled myself and confirmed that I did not know what I was doing. So, I joined a nutrition and workout program to force me to be accountable and to teach me new things.

The program has been life changing. I have already achieved a body that 1 year ago I would have killed for…and this is the 1st month of the program.

In the process, I have learnt a few things and the primary one has been that ‘discipline eats motivation for breakfast’.

The feeling of having the motivation to do something is exhilerating. It feels like being in alignment with some higher purpose. You feel on the path of things and it brings a lot of happiness.

But, it is the nature of motivation to be short-term. And that is what I didnt realise. Motivation is short term to show you what needs to be fixed to achieve your desire. It invariably goes away.

I was incorrectly believing that this meant that something was wrong with my goal: “if I was motivated before and now I am not, maybe this goal is wrong. Otherwise why would my body take away positive signals” was my thinking. And so I would go back in the loop of re-evaluating my goals instead of just taking the action to pursue them.

Joining the program has taught me that you cannot build your house on motivation. Being healthy does not need to be re-evaluated as a goal. So, in circumstances if I dont have motivation for it, then I clearly need something else that takes me to my goal. Being on a diet plan will be supported by motivation for the first week or so (for me). But in that second week when it runs out and you are hungry and cant focus on anything, you will need a reason to stick with the goal.

And this is where discipline comes in. Discipline, for me, is the act of doing the right thing consistently without worrying about the present outcome because you delay your gratification to a later time.

This required me acknowledging that I will feel bad in the present moment. Of course I will feel bad when I diet because my body is used to recieving a certain kind of happiness from eating that it wont anymore. But feeling bad is not a reason to not do something.

Unlike with motivation, discipline is long term. You can build (in fact you should, to be successful) an identity on it. “I am someone who gets the job done regardless of how I feel”. In answer to feeling bad, you just dont consider it anymore or you consider the happiness you will have later if you stay consistent.

Discipline then gives rise to a system automatically which later on takes away a lot of thinking. You know what you have to do and when to do it so you know your plan and you know how to make a choice. Every excuse then falls away and your life starts to mould around this. You know you cant listen to your excuses anymore and so over time you stop making excuses at all, or those excuses get queiter and quieter. You have to follow the program because…you have to. Simple as that.

I have achieved more in terms of my body in a 1.5 month program following a strict diet and nutrition then I have in 6 years of working out. Thats a simple fact. It has nothing to do with the diet or the workout but by being consistent with one act for 1.5 months which is the right ac I look and feel better than I have ever looked and this is just the start. I cannot wait to see what the next 4.5 months hold and what I can achieve with them.