I spoke to several people at the beginning of the month excited by the prospect of yet another diet, exercise regime or life style change which would be orchestrated by the latest program offering salvation to all those that have been alluded from their dreams so far.

Despite this lip service however, they have either not started or simply thrown in the towel.

It doesn’t take long to recognise that despite the up to date branding and advertising, what’s being said is just a regurgitation the same old crap, but the proverbial stool sample has once again just been wrapped in new and shiny packaging in hope of disguising the stench of the plagiarism  that has been said for years and evidence that once again you can polish a turd.

It’s not to say that much of the information is not sound. In theory, or in the laboratory where conditions are controlled, perhaps it is.

But in reality, where human beings are involved and conditions often not ideal, most who embark on these new and wonderful creations fail long before they discover it’s because it’s predominantly bollocks as far as they are concerned.

Most of the blogs, articles, books and posters I have read this last month seem to be rehashing the same old crap. How long will it be before the penny drops and we suddenly say – ‘hang on, regardless of what this Numty celebrity is saying, this stuff never works for me, or anyone I know personally, why am still buying in to this shit! SOMEBODY STOP ME!’

Whether it’s the celebrity or the therapist saying we can do it, the reality is most people can’t or won’t for a plethora of reasons.  But the transactions been made by this point, so it business as usual for those making the money from selling it and also for those buying into it under the guise of ‘hope’.

Ironically the ones who are proving these theories right, rarely buy these products because they are too busy already doing it or living it naturally, (or unnaturally in a lot of cases, because to live the way these products recommend, usually requires some form of neurosis or obsessive condition on behalf of the participant.)

The fact is, that what we say we want, really isn’t as important as the effort it takes to achieve it.

Real and consistent change takes bloody hard work.

It rarely comes with bright glossy coloured photographs and a funky type face. It’s usually black and white with Times New Roman and it’s bloody dull.

Buying Tupperware and some coconut oil ready for the big lifestyle change is all well and good.

Getting all the gear is the fun part, but more often than not, it’s actually where we start and finish our journey into personal change.

But we are seduced into doing it each time because initially it makes us feel proactive without any real work.

The problem comes as soon as we have to actually fill the Tupperware. It only takes a few minutes to read about it over the holiday period when we are making our bold claims about what we are going to do come the new year, but in practice and in real time, preparing your meals for the week, making food list, finding time to do the mammoth shop for all the ingredients you have never heard of, involves a lot of time and effort usually on a day that your friends are calling from the pub to join them.

Very quickly, the technicolour images of the food you are about to prepare, according to your new publication, rapidly gets replaced day in day out by the repetitive monotone meal of reality consisting of either chicken, fish, turkey, and a sweat potato thrown onto a plate garnished at best with kale.

And as the dark days, the cold days, the days that you feel pissed off, which for a large majority is most days during the week, seem to overlap the ‘almost instant Nirvana’ initially created by your imagination of how it will be according to the latest Luminary to adorn the pages of Cosmo or the Sun.

The only real thing that can transform our worlds into the spectrum of all the colours of the rainbow that we have just bought, is actually all the crap we promised we would stop doing all along – because ladies and gentlemen that’s why we do it, to get away from our current mundane realities that a 15 minute meal alone will not and cannot remove!

Because let’s face it for most people life is mundane and tedious, going to jobs we hate, mixing with people we can barely tolerate and watching TV so banal an amoeba could multi task while watching it, where on occasion we get a two day interval called the weekend, which we often miss because we have tried to blank out the last 5 days with some sort of substance abuse.

The question is how long is this marketing ploy sustainable? How long are we willing to be duped?

Is it simply a case of those who get wise to the nonsense and remove themselves from clutches of this self-help cash cow, just get replaced by a new generation looking to pacify themselves on the teat of this archetypal marketing bovine.

Or is the simple truth that we are allowing ourselves to be hoodwinked because it’s easier than facing the truth.

If we are victims of a crime we’re rarely willing to look at how we may have had a part to play in it and that we could, or certainly can prevent it happening again in the future had we behaved differently.

But responsibility usually means losing something or stopping something you like doing.

It’s easier to blame something or someone else and keep doing what you have always done which alleviates our immediate discomfort.

Paradoxically, because we are willing to keep consuming this same old shit, we naturally defecate all over others with the same old clichés because they ‘sound good’.

This conventional wisdom may be more consumable than the truth and what really works, but it consistently makes us lethargic and unable to maintain the demands it enforces on us, even when all we are being asked for is a ‘miraculous five minutes’ to make the change!

The best thing we could do is stop wasting our money on products that we believe will change us simply because the advert on the side of the bus told us so.

In most cases regardless of which Reality Star says so, these thing won’t work, not for you anyway – you’ve proved that many times over.

Why believe a stranger when you know deep down you’re a ‘two weeker’ at best before you revert back to your old habits.

And it’s not really that we are incapable. Place a gun to a loved one’s head and the only thing stopping the trigger being pulled is you achieving the allusive goal, you could achieve it. There’s simply more pain in seeing that special someone’s brains all over the wall than all the discomfort it will be to train for the marathon. It’s just about scales of pain and pleasure why we fail to go the distance.

If we are not changing it’s because something’s more important and no amount of Tupperware is going to contain that emotional baggage.

No new trainer is going to help you run fast enough to outpace what’s holding you back. Because where we keep trying to run to, is actually away from what we unconsciously think we need.

If we keep ending up back to where we started each year, then perhaps this is a good place to start.

What are you getting in your old habits that serves you better than what you say you want in your new year’s resolution?

Ask yourself what’s the consistent complaint?

What the accompanying behaviour?

What’s the pay-off of acting this way? Even if it’s a negative behaviour, there’s always a pay-off.

And what’s the cost of continuing to behave this way. What’s the future look like if you continue down this path? Is it better than the alternative?

By asking ourselves questions that get to the foundation of where we live every day, regardless of the ‘next Fix’ you buy, we can start to unearth some truths about what we are really looking for or trying to prevent.

It’s inside of these ‘self-awareness packages’ that offer us the solutions we are looking for. It’s often from these discoveries that all the things that we constantly fail to achieve with each new resolution, start to manifest often as a by-product of something quite unrelated.

Learning to love ourselves first is much more likely to lead to weight loss than attempting to lose weight to get someone to love us ever will.

Until we are willing to look at WHY we want to change, or WHY we keep failing, we will continue to buy products that contain the same information that has been around for decades and can be accessed easily for free on the internet, or books that have been written years before and by the actual person that came up with the theories.

But the challenge will always be that we are hard wired for instant gratification and how we then train ourselves with self-awareness to overcome that fact.

So this post I’m sure, if read at all, like all the other information, will be forgotten as we run to the next shiny thing that offers us a way in the back door, which is ironic when you think what comes out of the back door.