I Didn't Like It and That's...OK.

Firstly, in the interests of full disclosure, let me say that I've consumed mass quantities of the Beachbody Kool-Aid. I love the company, the people, the products, the community, just about everything! But its the "just about" that I want to talk about here. Beachbody had come out, over the last few months, with the new program P90X2 and a new flavor of the ultra premium health shake Shakeology, Tropical Strawberry, a totally vegan formulation.

I had tasted the Tropical flavor at the 2011 Coach Summit and it was amazing! It tasted so good, so smooth, mixed with pineapple and yogurt and a few other things. I could not wait for it to come out. People who had already received it were marvelling at how good it was the taste, the flavor, it was fantastic!

I got mine! And I was underwhelmed. From how it tasted at Summit to how it tasted now was..different. I still think its the best tasting of the Shakeology flavors, but how it mixes up leaves me cold. But almost everyone else is raving about it! "It tastes great!" "Mixed it with xx!" "Its the only flavor I'll drink now!" And I..kinda didn't like it. It must be just me...something must be wrong with me...

And then P90X2 arrived. I was in the middle of my current round of P90X and wanted to finish that to get ready for X2. What fantastic results I had! I literally could not wait to tear open the box and get to it! Finally I finished the X. Time for X2! Could not wait!

And I didn't like it. Wait that's not right...I really didn't like it. No...wait...I hated it! Yes, you read that right...I hated it. And it wasn't just "I hate this workout." It was 5-6 weeks of just not liking any of it! X2 is a very different type of program. "Functional Fitness" they call it. Its a lot of balance, stability ball, one-footed-ness. After 6 weeks I learned that I am unbalanced and unstable.

And it didn't help that everyone else doing it was, again, raving at how wonderful this was. "Couldn't wait to do P.A.P. or Plyocide or Core," they said. Again I figured it must just be me because, truthfully, P90X2 made me not want to work out..that's how much I disliked it. So once more I assumed there must be something wrong with me.

Unfortunately, this negativity began to affect every other area of my life! Truly! I didn't want to work out, I felt worthless and weak, I was miserable and depressed. Why didn't I like this? Everyone else did...what was wrong with me?

And then I talked to Kim Bemis, another Beachbody coach and all around swell chick, and she said seven words that completely changed my attitude:

"Joe, it's OK not to like something."

So...I put P90X2 back in the box. It's not for me...right now. I may revisit it sometime in the future. I'm doing a P90X/Insanity hybrid workout for the next 90 days and I AM LOVING IT! I can't wait to get out there and sweat. And I've thrown the new Tai Cheng program in too, which I'm loving also!

I guess the long winded point of this whole thing is - Try it, stick with it, and if you don't like it...that's fine. Move on to something else. But do something. It was a surprisingly hard lesson to learn. But it's also given me some insight into those who start a program and quit. They try, its too hard, they stop. The magic is in the moving on to something else.

Don't like Insanity? Try RevAbs. Don't like P90X? Try Power 90. Don't like this? Try that.

Simple enough but it was such a difficult lesson to learn.

Joe