Keeping an open mind about yourself is difficult, especially because most of us have such closed minds about everything else.  So people always approach fitness like a journey that requires all their mental baggage.  Really, they should see it like a big move after a disaster.  I’ve compared the body to a home before, one that’s extremely difficult to keep clean.  I’ve also said that you can’t plan things so firmly at home when you’re cleaning, you just have to get to everything that needs to be done often enough for things to be clean all the time.  If you clean up daily, then things generally look and feel clean. With the body and exercise, things are the same way.  Your unhealthy vices, drinking, cigarettes, coffee, laziness, sweets or anything that can hinder the fitness process (even children) when accumulated together are the furniture.  Cleaning products are like exercise supplements, but the exercise is the manual labor.  All the extras, the exercise bike you bought on Craigslist that you used once and the nine-hundred dollar purse you bought to spite your boyfriend, are excess baggage, just like he unnecessary stigmas we have about exercise.  So if a slow disaster comes to your home, like an eroding foundation that causes everything to crash to one side, that’s no different from the slow disaster foods with high fructose corn syrup can cause in the body over time.  If an instant disaster occurs, like a hurricane or a flood, or both, then that’s like an unforseen tragedy, a car accident maybe.  A heart attack is a foreclosure.  A new diet or workout plan is a vacation-some are difficult to manage, some are supposed to be fun, everyone expects a magical change then comes back to reality.

What I’m interested in is moving.  Instead of new diets and workout plans, you should be, metaphorically speaking, where you want to live.  Meaning, it should be fun to constantly clean your house because you’re proud of it, and it’s where you want to be.  So instead of believing that you can go on vacation with a diet and come back to show off your tan to your friends, why not move to where you’d vacation?  You’ll say it’s too difficult, and that you’d be sacrificing too many things.  Well, you’ve only got one life, trying to live three lives will leave you living for three, eating for three, stressed for three, and as fat as three people.  Living your life the way you know you should live it is much more effective than living it the way you’d like.  Reason?  We’d all like to do so many things.  Many of us only want to be a few things.  If the numbers evened, meaning we wanted to do less and be more, then our days would be full of productivity.  It’s excess baggage.  Instead of worrying about the furniture, the obstacles all around, understand that a combination of baggage and furniture means you’ll look like a hoarder.  It’s impossible to clean a house like that.  It’s doubly impossible to move.  So when making your move, treat things as if they’ve seen a disaster, as if they’ll be unusable at your new place in your new city.  Throwing away all that baggage means totally opening your mind and not allowing anything to hold you back from moving again if need be.  Simplify, strip down, and figure out exactly what you need to keep things tidy.  Everything you don’t need, get rid of it, it’s making you fat, and limiting you.