I deliberately set out to lose a significant amount of weight and I deprived myself in order to do it.

Picture: sylvar

I moved away for the ‘slowly building a lifestyle’ concept, just to see what it would be like to push the envelope. I’m glad I did, it paid big dividends.

The time was right for me to see how far I could go with some sustained effort and self-discipline – something that’s been sadly lacking from my performance for a few weeks now.

I love the concept of building a lifestyle. I recognise that it’s important to build some better habits in terms of exercise and diet, but recently I’ve felt there’s something in that idea that gives me a let out if I fail to make some progress each week.

I accept that losing weight is not a race, but nor is it something I want to prolong forever. I don’t want it to be some indefinite task hanging over my head – something that never quite gets achieved.

I want to reach my goal sooner rather than later and in 3 months time I don’t want to be writing I’ve only lost five pounds, but hey, at least I haven’t gained weight. It’ll be tedious to write about it and it’ll be tedious to be living that life.

I would much rather write about how good it feels to have dropped weight and enjoyed some exercise. I’d much rather read about it too!

Seeing Dave Wright do so well over the last two weeks has driven me to strive for the same results. I’ve been inspired by his achievements and it’s helped me believe that I can dig deep and do the same.

Like I said, it’s not a race, but the quicker I can get to where I want to be, the quicker I can start to work on the second part of my goal which is to learn to maintain my goal weight and thereafter work on increasing my muscle mass and strength. That’s where I want to spend most of my time and that’s what I want to build my lifestyle around. Dragging it out as I have, is like building a lifestyle based around weight loss. That’s not the lifestyle I want to be living.

Of course there will be times when I post that I’ve maintained my weight. It’s true that there are other factors at play with maintaining weight, including water retention, glycogen reserves and increased muscle mass, so I shouldn’t always see maintaining as a failure. But to be honest, most of the time, maintaining will be a result of my failure to do what’s necessary and endure the discomfort of making tough decisions.

It’s nice that I’m comforted when I’ve only maintained but it’s not really doing me any favours. At some levels it allows me to believe it’s OK, and it’s not OK. Living a weight loss lifestyle is purgatory and I want it to end.

In the coming weeks I’m aiming for a more modest 2lb loss, but I will err on the side of caution and steer closer to a 3lb loss than a 1lb loss.

If I consistently post 3lb losses then I can address that by eating a little more or exercising a little less. How good would that be?

A further statement of intent:
In four weeks time I will weigh 187 lbs
In eight weeks time I will weigh 179 lbs
In twelve weeks time I will weigh 173 lbs

Maintenance isn’t an option for me anymore!

Are you living a weight loss life style? Would you care to post a quick statement of intent in the comments?

Picture: fireflythegreat

We’re eight weeks in with the Wednesday Weigh-In and by my reckoning I should be in the region of 16 lbs down. That’s half the weight I wanted to lose at a modest rate 2lbs a week.

O – M – G !!!

What’s wrong with me?

Why have I lost a grand total of 1lb in EIGHT weeks?

That’s pitiful by anyone’s standards even taking Christmas into account.

The very best I can say about my circumstances is that I’ve maintained…. but then that’s not quite accurate. It’s more accurate to say that I’ve lost weight… and now I’m putting it back on again.

The BEST I can say is that I haven’t exceeded my starting weight. And I’m clinging on to that fact for dear life.

Clearly something isn’t clicking.

I don’t think any of what I’ve written to date at BlogToFit is outrageous nonsense or even dramatically flawed. I think my basic plan to get fit is sound.

So what’s the deal?

Well… I think I’m NORMAL.

Seriously, I think that I’m just the same as everyone else who’s trying to lose weight or get fit.

I have the same busy lifestyle where I’m trying to fit a quart into a pint pot – constantly juggling conflicting priorities and making a hash of it.

Prior to starting my own blog Teach My Children Well – which was intended to track my self improvement – I spent a lot of time reading blogs like Zen Habits, Scott H Young, Steve Pavlina and many more like them and the vast majority of them seem to advocate simplifying our lives and concentrating only on one major goal at a time for a month at a time (as per the links).

I’ve always loved that idea but I’ve never been able to do it. My life is just too full of other things.

There are too many urgent demands that I need to be dealing with right now. Real issues in my life that will come to a head within the next six weeks like the looming threat of a return to work and an overwhelming desire to avoid that by finding a new way to make a living, not to mention the fact that I have a four children to marshal around, along with all the attendant duties of a stay at home parent – I don’t feel I can afford to put any of those things off for 30 days so that I can get on top of the weight loss.

What I’m going through now is exactly why I came to the web. I was looking for the solution to my general inability to get things done. I felt overwhelmed all the time, which led to procrastination, which led to nothing getting achieved.

I’ve always kept an open agenda, because I’ve convinced myself that I don’t want to live my life by an appointments diary. Which is nice for doing spontaneous things, going where my fancy takes me and getting into the moment, but it gets nothing achieved.

Vast swathes of time pass and I look back and wonder how, with all that time, I managed to achieve so little.

I know I need to do less. I know I need to cut so many more things out of my life in order to get the important things done, which is why I chose to have only four priorities.

I’m cautious about following another hair brained scheme to trick myself into losing weight but if I don’t do something, in two months time, I’ll still be nearly 200lbs and I’ll still be without an income and forced to return to work and both of those scenarios are about as far away from my major goals as it’s possible for me to be.

I strongly suspect my personal organisation is the root cause of my problems. The open agenda approach means I’m doing what I feel like doing, not what I really need to be doing.

Are you organised? Does this help with your fitness or weight loss goals?

What would you do?

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