Failure Isn’t An Option – Or Is It?

So what do you do when you start a fitness blog with two other people and then you spectacularly fail to get fit or lose the fat?

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?

Or am I totally missing the point? Should I just pull myself together and get on with it?

Should I put fitness on hold indefinitely until I’ve dealt with my top three priorities.

What would you do?

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Getting fit is not my top priority

I say again….

Getting fit is NOT my top priority.

What?

How can that be?

If I’m not fit and healthy little else matters, right?

Picture: redvrs

If I’m sick or injured or suffer a debilitating illness my health and fitness will jump to the top of my list and I’ll consider it over almost every other factor.

The thing is though, I’m not terribly unfit, nor am I terribly unhealthy – I am what might best be described as ‘out of shape’.

The damnable thing about that is… I can live with being ‘out of shape’ for a while longer.

When I think about it, this may account for my repeated failures to move the last 30lbs.

Yes, fitness is important to me but it’s not the driving force in my life – not most of the time anyway – and over the years I’ve artificially hoisted my fitness goals to the top of my list of things to achieve whether or not they deserve to be there.

The problem being, I then neglect more important issues until they bite me on the arse.

And at that point I find myself in a confused muddle of misaligned priorities, failing to achieve any of my goals.

So I’ve changed my priorities to reflect my situation.

My prompt for this wasn’t the dawning of a new year, it was instead the prospect of having to return to work after my 9 month break.

It’s not something I want to do, as I place far too much value on my current role as stay-at-home dad and the freedoms it offers. But having neglected to keep a tighter grip on my financial situation (misaligned priorities biting me on the arse) the need to get more money coming into the household might force my hand.

On realising the magnitude of the situation, suddenly my mind has been diverted away from wanting to get fit for relatively trivial reasons like how much better I’ll look to the Mums in the school playground (don’t even waste your time telling me how sad I am! I’m fully aware of mypatheticness ), to how the hell can I avert this catastrophe?

I’ll be honest, my desire to get fit is predominantly driven by vanity, and much less for the long term health benefits – and this is something I’m only just realising.

But this doesn’t mean I have to abandon my fitness goals, it just means I have to be more realistic about them.

At the moment getting fit and lean is number four on my list.

Still, that’s not too bad as there are only four priorities in total. Other matters formerly holding the title of ‘priority’ have been dumped.

My top three priorities relate to trying to maintain my status as a stay-at-home Dad and avoid a return to the Police Force (and I’ll write more about this on my personal blog).

As far as fitness is concerned I’m still going to be eating less, I’m still going to be exercising more, but I am prepared to compromise my fitness goals in favour of the first three priorities if I have to.

This feels like a sensible approach to take and by accepting that there are other more important things to consider right now, I might actually start to get fitter and leaner.

Where do health, fitness and weightloss fit into your list of priorities?

Tara, Dave and I would like to thank you for joining and supporting our little community here at BlogToFit and we look forward to your company in 2009.


We wish you all a very Happy New Year!

Want a bit of humor and motivation delivered via email every weekday? Subscribe to get each BlogToFit post delivered for free! Email not your thing? That’s okay, you can also subscribe via RSS – like all the cool kids do. It’s also free. Unless you really WANT to pay us.