Of course I’m starting a new weight loss program – it’s a new year!!!
😳
So I don’t even know where we left off anymore and frankly, I don’t care.
That’s part of my new philosophy for 2013 in general, but particularly in trying to get back on track with moving my health in the right direction – if/when I have a bad day, I don’t dwell and beat myself up over it … I just do my best to learn from it and move forward.
I think a lot of people fall off the horse with diets and exercise because they build up unrealistic goals for themselves and then when they have the slightest slip up, the whole thing ends up falling apart like a house of cards. I know that I’ve done that in the past – I can remember being super proud of myself for having exercised consistently for several weeks in a row, but the very first time I missed a day, it was all downhill from there because instead of having exercised “for 23 days straight,” I was back to “2 or 3 days in a row” which didn’t sound anywhere near as impressive.
I guess it sounds kind of weird, but in a way I’m trying to be less hard on myself with this latest weight loss iteration because I’ve tried so many different approaches over the years and none of them have quite worked out, it’s something new and when I think about it long term in my head, it kinda makes sense. You see, I know that there are about a million different things that I could be doing to maximize my weight loss, from exercise to diets to sleep, but I’ve also got a lot of other things going on and in the past, it’s always been quite the struggle to juggle the two. I could either excel in weight loss or I could maintain my writing schedule, but I never had enough time to do both.
Eventually I’d sacrifice one for the other, which was great in the short-term because I’d lose 10 pounds or get a bunch of writing done, but then I’d want to swap and sacrifice the other to play catch-up, and all of my hard work would get erased while I switched focus away to the other thing.
So I don’t want to repeat that again in 2013. Instead, I want to try making little changes here and there that I can really absorb into my daily routine before moving on to other things. Right now my focus has been on the following:
- I’ve been cleaning up my diet and trying to get my daily calories down from all of the bingeing that I did throughout the holidays, although ironically I think being sick last week kinda helped with that!
- At the advice of my wife, I started taking a multi-vitamin each morning. I had jokingly asked if I could get them shaped like the Flintstone characters that I had growing up, but she surprised me with these gummie ones that don’t really feel like I’m taking pills at all! Why doesn’t every kind of pill come in gummy bear format?!
- I’m trying to do one exercise-y thing each day, whether it’s walking the dog, spending some time on the elliptical, doing some yoga and playing games on WiiFit, or just a few rounds of push-ups.
At this point I’m trying not to even think about weight loss goals because it’s too easy for me to extrapolate out the math and say, “Well, if I can lose 2 pounds a week, that’s 50 pounds in 25 weeks, so I should be all done by the end of May!” Of course, I’d like to lose a couple of pounds a week and WiiFit insists on tracking my progress every time I turn the thing on, but more important to me at this point is these little baby steps. Besides, I know that if I’m doing these things right, the pounds will start to come off on their own, so it’s really just a different way of looking at things.
Who knows – maybe this time it’ll be the approach that actually works. 😐