My Journey With Weight Loss – Getting Started

So I am proud to announce that today I completed my 3rd running interval training for the week and for the first time it wasn’t torture. This week I did 3 days at 2:30 minutes walking and 1:30 minutes running. Tuesday I get to bump it up to 2:00 minutes walking 2:00 minutes running (I so can’t wait I say with sarcasm). As well, I am going to do a day of training up a hill. My legs are already screaming at the thought of doing this (said with even more sarcasm).

So this week I wanted to talk about getting started mentally before taking this journey to weight loss and getting healthier. Let’s first start with goals. My goal when I began this was simply to walk more. That was it. It wasn’t about losing weight or improving my health it was just to get out of the pandemic isolation and do something. But then things began to happen, my weight went down, my blood pressure went down, my glucose went down and walking 10,000 steps a day became too easy. So I set my first goal, let’s lose 25 pounds and get me to a healthier weight. Now that may seem pretty simple but I soon realized that while setting a goal is important it can’t be your only motivator. More importantly, setting a goal needs to be realistic so that you don’t fail simply because you haven’t achieved what you wanted. Instead, when things plateaued or went south, I just re-grouped. I reminded myself that I had been obese for a long time, I hadn’t moved in years but most importantly I had already done well since I started this. Yes, sometimes I had to make strategic adjustments to my plan (and my goals) but I learned not to beat myself up. Rather, I recognized that if it took me twice as long to cross that finish line than I had initially planned then so be it. It all became about changing mentally, finding that groove that would keep me going and taking one step at a time each day. As long as I kept going I knew I could do this. I should note, I am fortunately that I live in a beautiful city on the ocean that has a lovely promenade. Walking that promenade every day (often twice or sometimes 3 times a day) gave me a sense of peace and appreciation for the wonderful world that surrounds us. I took the time every day to say hello to each person I passed and always with a smile. Sometimes they returned the gesture, sometimes they didn’t but that really didn’t matter to me. What I was doing was for me and the occasional friendly chat with a stranger just helped immensely. The bottom line, set your goal but don’t let it deter you.

Along with goals is sometimes failures. I admit there were often days when that scale wasn’t moving where I wanted to say to hell with this, if I work this hard I should always have results. But that is not realistic, failures will happen and that is ok. For example, at one point I decided to ramp things up (a lot) and was trying to walk 20 km a day. Yes, I was successful in doing this for nearly a week and then ended up with horrible pain in one of my thighs. I thought it was related to my chronic back issues but no, it was a repetitive strain injury. I ended up having to take 3 weeks off from working out and quite frankly I was irate. However, during those 3 weeks I stuck to my healthy eating plan, let my leg recover and much to my surprise still lost a few pounds. What I learned from this is failures are ok as long as you learn from them and don’t let them stop you. I’ve had other failures along the way but I now know you take those failures and you learn from them, you don’t let them make you lose track of that finish line. More importantly, I learned that really listening to your body can help prevent some of those failures.

So, embrace your goal but don’t let them rule your overall plan. Embrace your failures and don’t let them prevent you from moving forward. Just keep going!