Lipstick Lesbian Catch

^{The most unpleasant place you can't avoid visiting}

^{There are a few 64 million dollar questions.}

^{Who invented unicorns?}

^{Why does Paul Hollywood get meaner with every series of Great British Bake Off?}

^{What mysterious cosmic mischief causes your hair to wilfully misbehave on the day you’re going out with the person of your dreams?}

^{But the one that keeps me up at night pondering is this one:}

^{Why, when exercise and good nutrition are two of the most important things for our survival, did the universe give us an almost universal dislike of both?}

^{Obviously there are some freaky people who like to exercise and who revel in the eating of a “clean” diet, but they are seriously outnumbered.}

^{Finally, after countless hours of being all thinky, cogitating hard, I have an idea about that.}

^{Here it is.}

   ^{When exercise is effective, it’s kinda painful, tiring, makes us achy and sore. It’s not fun. All those attributes put it way outside our comfort zone.}

   ^{When we change our eating habits and *gasp* cut back on the awesomeness that is carbohydrate (because let’s face it, the reason it’s so hard is because we all love carbs so much. I flippin’ love ciabatta. And toasted burger buns. And I love them a heck of a lot more than I love steak or cod.) that practice drags us kicking and screaming out of that same comfort zone.}

   ^{When we grab ourselves by the ear and march ourselves off to bed early to stock up on sleep, we leave the comfort zone on the sofa, watching Netflix.}

   ^{Ditto when we do our very best to focus on the breath rather than the complications sitting in our email inbox. Or force ourselves to plan our meals out for the week.}

^{None of these powerful, wonderful activities, powerful and wonderful as they may be, live inside our comfort zone, but annoyingly, that comfort zone is where we’d all spend our days if it were up to us. Because it's comfortable. You know?}

^{But we have this annoying tendency to want to improve ourselves, to get better at things, and there's no getting away from it.}

^{We can draw exercise, food, sleep, meditation towards the zone, as we get better at them and they become habitual.  But - and this is a big but - none of these things ever gets into the comfort zone completely.}

^{Exercise is always taxing; once you’ve got fit, you have to maintain it.  With food, there’s always going to be some tempting morsel that drapes itself seductively over the table before you. Late night tv and worries will frequently compete for your sleep and meditation time.}

^{And that, right there, is the truth of why we find exercise so hard to make friends with, why even when we’re regular lean eaters sometimes we’d still rather not bother and why it’s so easy to slip away from a healthy lifestyle, back into our old, less-than-perfect ways.}  

^{This isn’t a blog designed to make you think “ah, well, if it never gets easier, I’ll just jack it in now”. It’s one hoping to make you see your struggles, whatever they may be, with new eyes.}

^{Outside your comfort zone may be a tough place to go and live, but if you decide to do something new that involves bettering yourself, you’re going to have to go there and stay there for a while. So you’re going to need to make it homey.}

^{You’ve done it before. If you went to Uni and lived away from home, you bunked up with a bunch of strangers and you got through it. If you work, at some point the tasks you now do with relative ease were once unfamiliar and nervewracking.}

^{Get out there, into the thickets, the thorns and the darkness and you’ll see that you adjust, eventually.  You will. Speed that process up by taking a few weapons with you.}

^{For me, great weapons include a training buddy, clothes} that make me smile (usually with Elmo on them) and happy music. All three make exercise a more comfortable experience. For food, not keeping junk in the house, marrying someone who cooks well (a real coup if you can pull this one off!) and finding good foods that take the edge of cravings all help. For sleep it doesn’t take much - a good book and an awareness of how wrecked I feel in the mornings is usually enough to get my feet to carry me up to bed.

^{You can make that place outside your comfort zone more appealing. And you’ll need to if you want your goals to be realised.}