The Power of Positivity: Health and Fitness
jen Landry 
How to change your mindset so reach your goals faster.
When it comes time to make a change, whether it is for health reasons and/or aesthetic reasons, we add workouts and take away food. We add workouts because we all know how good it is for you and how important it is. On the flip side, we tell ourselves we cannot have carbs or sweets. We try to remove what we see as bad and what could be harmful. These thoughts are working against each other, and the confliction is not helping anything. Adding positive actions, like working out, can lead to much better results. This is especially true when it comes to habits of nutrition.
Diets often fail because depriving yourself of something can lead to wanting it more. Take, as an example, that you have decided that you are not going eat any carbs for 6 weeks. Pretty soon your craving of carbs increases, or worse, you start to eat them in excess when you finally reach your goal. This is true whether or not you are limiting or cutting completely. In either case, you will wind up with major set backs. The cravings will make it hard to focus on the goal and all the other good you are doing and in turn, lead to a longer process or a less successful journey. Going carb crazy when you finally reach your goal, will cause you to back track on the goal and return to or surpass your previous state. There is a reason one of the best pieces of advice on the market is "everything in moderation" or "the 80/20 rule". Both of these allow you the grace to have the bad things and still maintain an overall positive diet.
If you try and add positive things, like workouts or veggies, you often enable a better headspace, less self hate and less time for poor choices. I mentioned before that we know workouts give us a health and energy boost and overall its good for you. So we add it. If you add an hour of exercise per day, you cannot add an hour of time to per day, so it needs to come from something else. It might replace the hour that you spent sitting on the couch watching tv eating your favorite chips or the hour of the day that spent wandering isles of a Target getting food and treats you don't need. In either case, the workout is leaving you less time for a more destructive habit. During that hour you are also creating a better headspace and putting yourself in a better mood. Generally, you tend to not spend a lot of time being mad at yourself for working out so hard either.
Now let's take a look at a nutritional habit. What if we think about our nutritional lifestyle the same way? Instead of saying something like "I want to drink less pop", you say something like "I want to drink more water". That will set you up for success, because the statement itself is no longer negative. Also, you are now concentrating on the task of adding water, not the thing you cannot have. You won't be craving the pop, because you are not depriving yourself of it. Framing it this way makes it a guide for self-improvement. Telling yourself you cannot have something is another indirect way of saying your not good enough right now. You drink too much pop, so you are not good or you do not have good eating habits. Instead, telling yourself to drink more water is saying that you may not be perfect and you could be better, but now your trying.
Another reason the subtraction factor is not as good, is because it can lead to an "oh well". In other words, you have the pop and decide "Oh well, now my day is ruined, might as well have all the junk". When was the last time you didn't hit your addition goal and then said, "screw it, I'm done"? If you try and drink more water, you don't get to the end of the day and say, "O well, I didn't drink enough water, might as well have that pop!" When you get to the end of the day you will ask yourself if the goal was achieved and no matter what the answer is, the follow up is often a reflection. You try and examine why you didn't hit your goal and what you could do differently or better the next day. This often happens without much thought or knowledge by the nature of the goal.
The final reason that addition works better than subtraction when it comes to healthy habits is because there is less room for self hate and negative talk, which will keep spiraling and getting worse. If you tell yourself you cannot have sugar, and you wind up having one bite of a cookie, the dialogue that follows tends to be negative, angry and mean. The words most often used are dummy, idiot, no self control, fatty, or the like. Then you do the oh well shrug we talked about earlier, the "who cares! I already blew it, might as well keep it going". Now let's look at a goal like, adding water. The only way you can really blow it, is by waking up and never having a single sip. Instead, you spend all day trying. You might have a moment or two where you think, "I forgot my water bottle!" but that is often followed up with a thought of where can you get water when you arrive at your destination or you might tell yourself to work harder when you get back home now. The thought process is much more about how to fix it later, or why you forgot. It is more positive than negative and leads to reflection and improvement.
All in all, take small steps toward achieving a health and fitness goal, but do your best to have it be a positive addition! Try to not to limit yourself in anyway, allowing yourself the room for improvement. Starting everyday by being more positive and giving yourself permission to add rather than subtract, will lead to quicker results, a happier headspace and overall, a healthier you!
