My Journey With Health And Fitness – Noticing The Changes

So this morning it was a strength training class. There weren’t a lot of attendees which is surprising since the 5:30am class is quite popular. However, since there were fewer people the instructor decided to bring out the bar bells. I watched them getting set up and thought, WTH? Sure enough, she encouraged us to do the deadlift exercise using the bar bells. I was going to decline until she said we should challenge ourselves, damn those words! So when it was time to do deadlifts during the circuit I went to a bar bell and dead lifted 100 lbs. The instructor said to me, doesn’t that feel great to which I replied NO. Still I managed to do those deadlifts and was pretty proud of myself.

When I started with this fitness centre for my 6 week challenge they talked to me about how important it was not to get discouraged if the scale was slow to move. They went through the same things I have posted about in the past, if you keep at this the fat in your body starts changing to muscle which in itself makes you more healthy. Moreover, the same mass of muscle weighs more than an equal mass of fat which means the scale might not move but you are still losing fat (I was happy they did not say the phrase that I hate, muscle weighs more than fat which of course it doesn’t because a pound of fat weighs exactly the same as a pound of muscle).

They also did something interesting, on my first day they took pictures of me from several different angles. They explained that in case I was disappointed with my weight result that if I followed the program I would be able to see the change in my body. Well, after the 6 weeks they took new pictures from the same angles and showed them to me comparing side by side what I looked like when I started. Now I already didn’t need confirmation because the scale had moved but there was no questioning the change in my hips, arms and face all of which clearly showed where the weight loss had come from.

As I continue with this program I vow to look at this holistically. I look for the changes such as seeing my collar bones again or starting to feel my hip bones. Those changes are getting more noticeable and just give me more motivation to keep going.

I’m holding off my next weigh in for a couple of weeks but the more I work at this the happier I am with the changes that I am noticing.