Tired of always breaking your exercise and diet plans?
Find yourself using the same old lame excuses time after time to get out of your commitment to change?
Listen here and figure out what excuses you constantly use that are actually convenient lies to let you have your ways and how to empty out that Excuse Cupboard and let it fall to dust!
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Rawk Starz Diva – Raw Food Diet Carlene Lost all her weight with.
Whole Food Diet – 1200 calories, 20% Max Fat, 500mg Max Sodium.
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[wd_hustle id="3" type="embedded"/]Transcription for Clean Out Your Excuse Cupboard
Hey, this is Carlene at Thin Brain Training. Welcome back to another one of my podcasts. This one is called the Excuse Cupboard. What does that mean? Right? You’re thinking, Why? What is she talking about?
Well, you know, over at RawFoodBootCamp.com. Which is a weight loss program what we’ve discovered is that we all have excuses. We have excuses for procrastinating, we have excuses for eating off plan, we have excuses for not going out and exercising. There are all these excuses.
But once you sit back, and you look at the excuses, they’re very similar.
When I listen to women, and they write to me, and they say, this is why I broke my plans, why I didn’t exercise? Their excuses are usually very similar to each other. I like to call it the excuse cupboard.
So say, you’re dieting, and you want to eat something off your plan, you actually have this cupboard you can go to pull out an old standby. Granted, it’s in your brain, not in the kitchen, but you can go and you can open it up and say, Hmm, what excuse will work for me right now? What excuse Can I come up with, that’s gonna let me get what I want. And when you do that, and you have them all so handy, and trust me, they are all so handy, you just pull one out and say, oh, that’ll do. And then you go do the thing you want to do or eat the food you want to eat or not do the thing you don’t want to do.
It’s handy, right? And it’s premeditated because you know that you have this whole big cupboard full of excuses, that work for you, that allow you to rationalize your choices.
What I like to do is I like people to look in that cupboard, and go and write down what those excuses are and what are the most common excuses they use on a regular basis. Write them down, and then sit and you look at them. Say to yourself, man, I do use that all the time. And look at that one, I use it all the time as well. Wow.
When you think about things, and you see the reality of them, it’s so much easier to see them for what they are, and dismiss them and say, I’m not going to use that. I use that all the time and look where it’s gotten me.
You know, it’s easy for us over at Raw Food Boot Camp. Because when you keep using excuses, you don’t lose weight. And in fact, you gain weight. So you have this tangible thing that you see happening. But for others using excuses for everything in their lives, they may not see it as blatantly as we do.
You know, you have to start really searching and wondering and pondering, how often do I use that excuse?
Emotions are a big thing over at Boot Camp. People eat over emotions all the time. It’s like we were taught that with every movie we’ve ever watched when a woman gets hurt, she heads for ice cream, right? We’ve been taught that we get rewarded with sweets when we feel hurt.
Back when I was a kid, you went to a dentist, they gave you a lollipop afterward. Seriously. We’re so used to food to satisfy emotions. So one of the things that we have looked at we’ve looked at quite carefully actually, and this will be another podcast later on, is about how we use our emotions to manipulate ourselves to get to our favorite off-planned foods.
That was something I was guilty of. And I had to learn way before I found raw food. I was doing that with anger. I was using anger as a means to get to my favorite food. So there’s is a way that I manipulated myself with an excuse that was in my cupboard. When I get mad, I get to go eat my favorite food. So when I just was kind of going a long time without my favorite food all I had to do is open that cupboard, pull out that anger excuse and it would get me there.
If I go see the person who makes me angry the most. And maybe you know, and this isn’t conscious. This is subconscious. Go and start a little tiff. I can get mad and I can leave in a huff and I can go get my favorite food.
Once I realized I was doing that. It was it was laughable. It was like holy crap, I can’t believe I do that. I stopped. The funny part of that is the anger subsided as well. No need to get angry if it doesn’t get me anywhere.
We often use the same excuses for exercise. We have a thing at camp where people have to exercise every day. There are excuses for that always, Oh, it was raining and cold. Well, you know, we have alternative methods for getting exercise that don’t include having to go outside, but then it’s always well the kids, It was too busy, I forgot…. The excuses build one on top of the other. But if you go and you look in that cupboard you’ll see the tab that says: telling Carlene, it was raining won’t work, pick another.
Tell Carlene, you were too busy or tell Carlene that the kids were in the way or an emergency happened. And you’re going down the list in the cupboard saying oh, I can pick this, this and this. Oh, wait which one is she going to believe? And which one am I going to then believe? You laugh, right? But this is how things happen.
People have normal everyday excuses that they use over and over and over again. And they go through them whenever they want to break their plan or their commitment or whatever. For you it might be about getting a paper done. You know what excuses you’re going to use today. The dog came and the dog got in the garbage. I had to go clean up all the garbage. Once I got done cleaning up all the garbage I was in such a bad mood. I knew that I couldn’t, I couldn’t write that paper.
How often does a dog get in the garbage? It should work. But how often do you come up with those kinds of excuses, excuses that let you get out of doing what you’re supposed to, that allow you to procrastinate? We are so self-manipulative.
We have all these ideas that we don’t even think about consciously that we use to get out of doing the things we don’t want to do. We know that that’s true with our kids, like, go clean your room. Now I’ve got to do homework, right? And then go do your homework, get your homework done. No, no, I had to do this. I had to do that. It’s naptime. We know this. We watch people with excuses all the time. You go into work, you’re working in a group and you say to someone, did you get that piece of the project done? Oh, no, sorry, I had take my mother to the train station or someplace and I didn’t get to it. I’ll get to it tomorrow.
How often have you heard that type of stuff like I, I couldn’t get something done for you because I had to go do something for someone else? That is an excuse that they have handily in their excuse cupboard. Can you see where I’m going with this? We have so many excuses lined up. We cycle through them. We go to the cupboard and we pick the one for the moment. We know what works and what doesn’t work and what we can get away with and what we can’t get away with.
It’s a well kept organized cupboard. So what you need to do is if you find yourself always having excuses, always rationalizing how you can do the things that you want to do that you know you shouldn’t be doing, then you need to start writing down the excuses that you use. Each time you do something that is off your plan, whether it’s food or getting projects done, or getting out of college, whatever it is, you need to have a list of your most common excuses. As you start to see there’s a pattern, what you have to do is, you have to look at that excuse, this overused excuse, and say, Man, what am I doing? Why am I going here all the time and lying to myself with this excuse so that I don’t have to do things?
When you tear things apart like that, when you say to yourself it’s true. You know, like why did I stay up all last night? Because my dorm mate was too loud? And therefore I can’t study today? Is that really true? Or could I have gotten up and maybe gone out to a common center and slept somewhere else? Or could I have, you know, could I have just gone and studied while she was making so much noise? You know, we can rationalize everything. But with that ability to rationalize, we can also tear apart these excuses and get rid of them.
Or we can decide not to empty out that cupboard so we can always have some excuse handily available to let us get away with what we want to get away with. And now you might say to yourself, yeah, but man, I want to get away with things. Well, in the dieting world, you can’t really do that. If you want to lose weight, you’ve got to hone in on these excuses and tear them apart and get rid of them. So that you can lose the weight and go live happily ever after once you learn to maintain that weight.
In other aspects of our lives, why do we want to get away with so much I mean, I get it, who wants to go to work every day? Who wants to have to finish projects? They’re part of our life and we have to do them and we don’t want to so we procrastinate. We find excuses not to do them. But then the consequences of those excuses tend to overshadow everything else. And, and we don’t get the things that we want in life.
You want to learn to play the piano. And if you procrastinate, and if you have an excuse, every day of why you’re not going to sit down and practice playing the piano, you’re never going to learn to play the piano. But if you start taking those excuses and saying, You know what, I used that one on Thursday, and this look at this one, I used that one on Wednesday, and oh, my God, I used that one on Monday, where are these coming from?
You will start seeing that excuses are just you manipulating yourself with handy ideas of how to break free from having to do what you have to do. We are very clever people. Our subconscious is even cleverer than us. We love to manipulate ourselves to get what we want. And a big part of that is excuses and rationalizations.
One of the biggest things people use over at Raw Food Boot Camp, is they’ll say to me, Well, you know, I went out and I was really hungry, and I didn’t have the food with me that you tell me all the time I should be prepared for. And so I went out and went to a restaurant, and they had all these foods, and they were so bad. So I just chose the least bad food there. And then I ate off someone else’s plate.
I come back and I ask, why didn’t you look up that restaurant before you went? Why didn’t you have food with you? Why weren’t you prepared and know what you were doing so that you could stay on plan? Yes, maybe I’m asking too many two questions that you wouldn’t want to answer. But still, it’s this whole rationalization if I go hungry, which just becomes the excuse, then I can rationalize why I ate that food. If I don’t prep my food, I can rationalize why I ate that food at the restaurant. If I don’t look up the restaurant, then I can say I didn’t know. And therefore I get to eat that food that is off my diet plan that I’m committed to Carlene to continue with.
These are the things we do. And if you look around at your life, you’ll find you’re doing them too, not just for diet and exercise but for many other aspects of your life. It’s why you’re not pushing forward, why you’re not going after your dreams, why you’re letting things stand still in your life.
Your excuse cupboard is full, and you feel very, very comfortable going to it and pulling out whatever works in the moment. So I suggest you go through that cupboard, you write them down, and you start seeing how often you use them. And then you start throwing them away, clean out that covered. It should be bare, but it probably won’t be but it should be as bare as you can possibly make it. Because once we throw out excuses, once we don’t excuse ourselves from accomplishing the things that we want to accomplish, we’re going to get so much more done. And we’re gonna feel so much better about ourselves.
So there’s my podcast on the excuse cupboard, which we talk a lot about at Raw Food Boot Camp, because everybody has one, including myself, we all have them. But we’ve got to keep them cleaned out and not let them get so overcrowded that all we have to do is blindly reach in and pull something out and get away with what we want to get away with. I know you’d prefer to get away with it. But if you’re listening to this, it’s because you’re interested in change, right?
And if you want to change, you have to look at the reality and the truth of all the things that are keeping you from changing.
That’s what we all have to do. We have to understand ourselves so that we can change ourselves and we can move on from the stagnant place we’re in to the life that we truly want.
All right, well good luck. If you like this podcast, please subscribe and make sure to share it with others that you know
