Day #146 - Say it Isn't So!

When my eyes popped open first thing this morning I knew... I forgot to post yesterday!  For 144 days I posted at least something, it wasn't much sometimes, but always something.  What's strange is that I really simply forgot.  It wasn't like I had an incredibly busy day, I just forgot.  I got home late from work and then we watched a show with the kids and I ended up going to bed early because I was tired.

It's kind of a pointer at where I've been lately with my mindset.  I'm not doing bad with eating, but at the same time, healthy eating isn't really on my mind like it was just a month or two ago.  I've been doing a lot of deep thinking, but it's not about health, it's more about me and my life.

I'm not going to get too worked up over this, it was bound to happen.  I'll be traveling next week and my schedule will be very hectic.  There might be future days when I simply can't post.

On the bright side, I got on the scale this morning and saw that I lost 1.5 pounds for the week.  As I said, I'm not doing bad, I'm just not dieting like I usually do.  Come to think of it, maybe this is how it should be.  Maybe I just need to be better than I was and make slow changes over time to get where I want.

As I said, I'll be traveling to NY tomorrow and won't be back home until Wednesday.  It's a 6 hour drive each way so I was thinking about downloading an e-book or two for the ride.  Maybe something about health and happiness.

One last note, I got a phone interview next week with the facility in Wilmington NC.  It's a big promotion opportunity and an absolutely great place to move to.  I don't think I have a great chance; it's a pretty big step to a different division, but even if it doesn't go well I'm still happy where I am.  We'll see how it goes.

146 Days in the books, on to 147.

Stay Strong!

Back to "Normal"

Wow!  Has it really been a full month since my last post?  It’s amazing how time flies when life gets crazy on you. Actually to say my November was crazy is probably an understatement.  But here I am having survived and actually feeling pretty good about it.  To be honest, I hadn’t planned on not blogging in November, but there are only so many hours in the day and when push came to shove other things took priority.  So here’s just a brief recap of my November:

My first week in November was fairly straightforward except my mother-in-law came to visit.  My father-in-law was away in Nevada for work and so she decided to come stay with us for a little while.  I like my in-laws; they are decent hard working people.  I was working a lot of hours at work getting ready for a project so it was nice that my wife had someone to spend some time with.  I didn’t have any time to blog at lunch time, and we spent the evenings playing games with the kids so blogging wasn’t really in the cards.

The next two weeks were like a blur.  The big project I’ve been preparing for finally started the implementation phase.  That meant visitors from corporate onsite for 2 straight weeks.  As the project leader I had to bring them out to lunch and I spent those 2 weeks in a conference room with free coffee and sodas (so much for my water intake).  I knew what was coming going in, so my goal for the month was to contain the damage.  I can’t remember the last time I worked so many hours.  As a supervisor, my job is to deal with daily issues and I have a lot of paperwork.  When you act as a project leader, those supervisor responsibilities don’t go away.  I would come in an hour early every day and stay 2 hours late every night to do my “day” job.  By the end of each week I would be so far behind I had to come in on Saturdays just to catch up.  To make matters worse, I had to spend Sundays raking leaves and getting my yard ready for winter.

After 2 solid weeks, my project finally was finished, but I’ve been exhausted.  I spent the early part of last week getting myself caught up before going to NJ for Thanksgiving.  It was nice to have some time off and get a little rest. 

If I had to give myself a grade for November it would be a “C”.  In terms of diet and exercise I did not do very well, but I would give myself high marks for maintaining a strong mental state under all the stress.  My mindset is so much better these days.  In the beginning of the month I did my best to hang on and then when I struggled I didn’t beat myself up over it.  I didn’t get all depressed just because I wasn’t sticking to my plan because I’m not perfect and I knew the month was going to be difficult.  That’s probably been the biggest change I’ve noticed in me; I am able to accept that I can’t be perfect all the time.  I made it through the month and now I’m ready to pick back up where I left off.

This journey I’m on is not going to be easy.  There will be other months like this last one; months where I don’t know how I’m going to get through.  It’s OK though, I’m not perfect and I’m not going to give up.  With the proper mindset I know I can accomplish my goals.  I told my wife that for the first time in a while, I actually feel like I’m heading in the right direction.

So here I am now in December.  I hopped on the scale this morning to see that I gained a little weight over the last month so I’m setting my goal for the month to lose 20 pounds.  My stretch goal is to get to under 300 before I leave for New Orleans on the 27^th.  Today I went to work with water and healthy food in hand and I picked up right where I left off.  It was a nice feeling today; feeling like everything was back to normal.  Wish me luck and Stay Strong!

[Photo: Flickr / Tobin]

Weight Loss Priorities

Very often you read posts from other bloggers talking about making losing weight a priority, but it’s a little rarer to find a post that talks about prioritizing within weight loss.  You can’t put all your focus on  everything at once, and if you try you just end up frustrated with failure.  Below are the priorities I established for myself to help lose weight and be healthy.  The #1 priority might surprise you a little…

Priority #5 – Exercise

Daily exercise is important with a healthy lifestyle, whether it’s structured or not.  People didn’t always have gym memberships or elliptical machines at home.  They stayed fit by moving around and working hard.  It’s interesting how things are starting to come full circle, you are beginning to see a lot of structured workouts designed around being unstructured.  Pull a sled, flip a tractor trailer tire, pick up a heavy sack and carry it around.  Not much different from the days of old right?  Regardless of the method, you have to move around, you have to work your muscles, and you have to get that heart rate up once in a while if you ever have any hope to drop the weight.

Priority #4 – Water

You can find tons of conflicting information about how much water to drink, but one thing you don’t find is people telling you water is not important.  There is no dispute that water is an important part of weight loss.  It keeps you hydrated, flushes out the bad stuff, and even helps you to feel full.  Decide for yourself what the right amount is but make sure “plenty of water” is one of your priorities.

Priority #3 – Healthy Eating

You can exercise hard an hour a day but it won’t really do you much good if you eat cheeseburgers and pizza the other 23 hours.  That’s why healthy eating is at #3 priority.  There are a zillion diets out there; a vast majority of them are healthy with a few rare exceptions.  I’m not going to try to convince anyone about what the right diet is because it depends on the person.  However, I can promise you the road to successful long term weight loss includes a healthy eating plan.

Priority #2 – Proper Mindset

I bet you thought this would be #1 priority?  Nope, it’s #2.  You can eat healthy, get plenty of water, and exercise regularly and still not be successful in the long term.  Proper mindset is what keeps you on your path.  Proper mindset is what allows you to keep your promises to follow the other priorities.  Yes, you can lose weight without proper mindset, but the success will be short lived and you will eventually find yourself in a worse situation than you were before.  Without priority #2, it becomes very difficult to maintain priorities #3, #4, and #5.

Priority #1 – SLEEP!

This might surprise you, but sleep is my #1 priority.  If you do not get good quality sleep, you will be too tired to exercise (#5).  If you do not get good quality sleep your body does not function properly and your metabolism is affected as well (#4 and #3).  Finally, if you do not get good quality sleep then it becomes impossible to maintain a proper mindset (#2).  If you do not get good quality sleep then you can forget about any of the other priorities; sleep trumps then all!


Priority Flip-Flop

Most people focus most of their energy on #3, #4 and #5 and give little attention to #1 and #2.  In fact many people believe that by fixing #3, #4, and #5 they will see improvement in #1 and #2.  Maybe that’s why most people (myself included) fail.  Maybe we need to put less energy into healthy consumption and exercise and more energy into quality sleep and proper mindset.  Am I suggesting #3, #4, and #5 be ignored?  No, that’s not what I’m saying; they are still important in any healthy lifestyle.  My point is that maybe our weight loss priorities are upside down.  Maybe by putting more effort into sleep and mindset you wouldn’t need so much effort in the others and they would actually become easier. 

What do you think; what are your weight loss priorities? 

[Photo: Flickr / R/DV/RS]

Know Thyself

 

I believe that many people that are trying to lose weight fail for this very reason; they don’t adapt to who they are.  They buy a book or they join a group or they buy some “program” hoping to get an instruction manual on how to lose weight.  The concept is sound, but flawed to the extent that likely that manual you just bought wasn’t built exactly for you.  Knowing yourself means learning new things, but then adapting those learnings to meet your objectives in the most optimal way for you.

It’s been 3 weeks since I started my transformation to a healthier lifestyle.  These first three weeks have been great; I feel like I have truly started down the road to being healthy.  However, I’ve already started to notice things that just simply aren’t going to work for me.  It’s time to make some changes.  When it comes time to make adjustments you have to make sure you are doing it for the right reasons.  There’s a fine line between knowing yourself and having an excuse to go back to some of your old unhealthy ways.

Over the last week I’ve taken some time to really think about what works for me and what doesn’t.  I think it’s important to analyze the situation before you actually make the change.  My first change is really a no-brainer; I mentioned it in my last post, I’m abandoning my morning meditation.

The Search for Perfection

I am my own worst enemy!  When I commit to something I tend to be a bit of a perfectionist and any deviation from perfection is seen as failure (no matter how small the imperfection is).  On the one hand it has helped me to be very successful in my career, but on the other hand I think it has been a source of a lot of my personal misery.  It is because of this I am abandoning my morning meditation.  There’s a ton of literature out there that touts the benefit of meditating for as little as 10 minutes each day.  I’ve been doing it on and off for the last 6 months.  There are times when I think it helps and other times when it seems pointless.  I’m abandoning it for now because when I don’t do it, it makes me feel like a failure on an otherwise successful day.  My goal right now is to lose weight, meditation can wait.

Did Someone Say “Good Morning”?

I am not a morning person.  Let me repeat, I am not a morning person in any stretch of the imagination.  Under my current plan, I’ve been getting up at 5AM and exercising.  I started with 15 minutes in the first week and I’ve managed to add 5 minutes each week after with the plan to get to a full 60 minutes.  The problem… did I mention I’m not a morning person?  I have to go to bed at 9PM in order to get 8 hours of sleep but unfortunately I just lie in bed and stare at the ceiling.  When the alarm goes off I just want to curl up and die.

Regular Routine and Fitting it all in

I chose the morning to exercise because it’s the only time in the day when I’m guaranteed to have time.  My job is not conducive to exercising at lunchtime regularly, and anyone with kids will tell you that days after work are filled with soccer, gymnastics, and music programs.  Because I’m a very structured person, I strive for a very structured workout regimen.  Doing it in the evening just didn’t make any sense.

Remembering the Past and Making the Change

When I restarted my blog the first time, I wrote a post called “My New “Radical” Exercise Plan”.  In it I wrote about changing my mindset and learning to fit in exercise whenever and wherever I could.  I went back and read that post and realized that I need to go back to something like it again.  I was also inspired by another blogger.  If you regularly follow weight loss blogs you know who he is [Check out his blog] .  I was inspired because this guy has a crazier schedule than I do, but he almost always finds time to do something in the name of exercise.  It’s not the same time every day and sometimes it’s just a walk, but he finds a way and he doesn’t get worked up when things change.  If he can do it, so can I.

Moving forward I’m abandoning my plan to get up at 5AM and workout to a structured plan.  Instead I’m just going to make a commitment to make an honest effort to do something in the name of exercise for at least 20 minutes every day.

Are These Changes Right?

As I said, I had thought about these changes for about a week before I made them.  I pulled the trigger after I missed a workout in the middle of last week.  I couldn’t make it up in the evening because I didn’t get home until 8PM and then needed to go to bed in an hour.  Since then I’ve been true to my word opting to do elliptical training after dinner during the remaining workdays.  I also played basketball with my daughter on Saturday for 30 minutes, and as of this writing (Sunday morning) we are getting ready to go on a 5 mile hike at a local state park.

Are these changes right for me?  No doubt, dropping the meditation is the right choice for me right now.  I hope to re-visit that someday, but I can’t fix everything all at once.  As for exercise, time will tell; it depends on how honest I am with myself.  I have no doubt that I made the decision for the right reasons, if I am truly serious about changing my ways, the exercise will happen.

-Stay Strong!

[Photo: Flickr / Zaneology]