5/13/2017 0 Comments Getting StartedI reach hesitantly for the door handle. It feels like it takes forever for my hand to make that connection, to grasp the cold metal and pull. But finally, it is done, and I have no choice but to follow through. Only a crazy person walks up to the door of a business and then walks away without entering, right? I’m stuck. I have to go in to save whatever small bit of positive self image that I have at this point. I might be fat, but I am NOT crazy. I give my name at the front desk, along with my I.D. and an inconspicuous tug on the t-shirt that I hope hides the monumental size of my protruding stomach. Once I survive the check in process, I look at the world around me: there’s a running type machine, something that looks like a bike, and another item that vaguely resembles a staircase. I’m paralyzed. I don’t really know how to use any of this equipment, and the people who are already utilizing it sniff me out and set sights on me the moment that they smell my insecurity. They are staring me down, making silent bets between them: “Let’s see if fatty knows how to use the treadmill.” No matter how detailed I make the above scenario, I will never be able to convey the suffocating, debilitating feeling that comes with walking through a Globogym when you are overweight. Even if you try to play it off as though you know exactly what to do on any given piece of machinery, your prior lack of dedication to fitness is written all over your body and judgmental eyes are reading you, attaching wild accusations to your story to try to fathom how you let the one thing over which you have absolute control go to waste. Perhaps you are just imagining their silent condemnation and disgust. Perhaps you are not. Either way, this perception is embedded in the heart of any person who has tried to tackle the most difficult part of losing weight: getting started. I can’t say that I have all the answers to quell your fears about starting this process, but I can explain the things that helped me overcome them. 1. Forget about past attempts and failures This, in my opinion, is likely the most essential part of getting started. Throughout my life, I have actively (and honestly) tried to lose weight on a variety of occasions. I did all of the things that I thought were right, and they didn’t seem to work. So, when anyone would question me about what I was doing to try to lose weight, reiteration of those failed attempts was the first thing out of my mouth. Dwelling on those failures became my strongest defense mechanism. I could provide evidence of my endeavors and attach them to the logical response anyone would have if a particular method of reaching a goal didn’t work. You wouldn’t continuously jump off of a roof in an attempt to fly. After a few failures (and broken bones), you would likely give up. The problem here is that I was giving those failures all of the power and not looking beyond them. If you truly want to fly, and jumping off of the roof does not seem to be working, you don’ just quit. You look for another method of achieving the goal. Just because you may have attempted to lose weight in the past and failed, doesn’t mean you will inevitably fail again. Maybe it just means that the methods you were using did not work for you. Reevaluate what you did then, decide what may or may not have worked, and try again with the appropriate adjustments. And what if those adjustments don’t do the trick? Well, if you haven’t noticed, exercise and diet fads are kind of a thing. Try something else, and something else, and something else until it clicks. A bird must learn how to flap its wings before it can learn how to fly. 2. Set a goal I remember sitting in a colleague’s classroom the Monday after my best friend’s wedding, crying into my shirt like a child who just had her puppy dog taken away. I was truly happy for my friend; she had found the love of her life and looked positively stunning on her wedding day. However, being at her wedding made me realize how soon I would be the one wearing a wedding dress. That was an image that I could not stand. I did not want the photographs that would be on my wall for the rest of my life to show the person who currently sat blubbering in a student desk in which she barely fit. So my colleague asked me bluntly, “Have you set a goal for yourself?” I had not. “You need to set a goal. How much weight do you want to lose?” I laughed while I said, absolutely unconvinced of the possibility, “100 pounds.” “Okay, that’s your goal. Now what are you going to do to get there?” That goal was a joke in my mind. I told her that I intended to walk 3 times a week and limit my calorie intake to 1800 calories per day. I really had no idea what I was doing, but this seemed reasonable to me. The next thing I knew, I had lost 10 pounds, then 10 more, and then that goal was no longer a joke. Fast forward a year, and I had reached that goal. Guess what I did next? I set a new goal. You can’t make make progress if you haven’t defined what progress means to you. That requires setting a goal. That goal will be different for every single person, but it must exist if you want to see progress. 3. Get a workout buddy My workout buddy was a 60 year old English teacher who taught in the classroom next to mine. She was very charismatic, incredibly blunt, and a little pushy. She was exactly what I needed. When I said something about wanting to start exercising, she said that she’d like to start as well. So, we decided that we would walk the side streets around the school three times a week after students were dismissed. On the first day that we were supposed to walk together, she marched into my classroom in the morning and said, “You better have some walking shoes, otherwise I’m making you walk in those.” And she would have. She held me accountable to follow through with the commitment I had made to myself. There were even days when I “forgot” my workout gear and she waited at the school until I went home, changed, and returned. We walked in the rain, the cold, the snow, when we were tired, and when we were too busy. With my initial mindset, I had no intrinsic motivation to begin exercising, let alone sticking to a regimen. My workout buddy not only held me accountable in those first several months of my journey, but also gave me the tools and confidence to hold myself accountable in the future, a crucial element in reaching those goals AND maintaining them. 4. Track your food intake honestly Without tracking my food, this was a healthy meal plan for me: Breakfast: One banana, a few tablespoons of peanut butter, and a cup vanilla yogurt Lunch: An Uncle Ben’s instant brown rice pack, a turkey sandwich on wheat bread with cheddar cheese, and a sandwich bag full of baby carrots with ranch dressing. Snack: 100-calorie microwave popcorn Dinner: A big old chicken taco salad with all the fixins' Dessert: A Skinny Cow ice cream sandwich At first glance, this doesn’t sound like an absolutely appalling meal plan. It’s not like I was eating Grande Meal from Taco Bell for a snack. And actually, for someone with a high metabolism or an intense workout regimen, this might be a pretty typical menu. However, I was not blessed with a great metabolism, and I did not workout to the intensity that such a meal plan would require. So, I recorded every last crumb of the meal above, and here is what it looked like: If my goal was to stay under 1800 calories per day, I’d just exceeded that goal by nearly 1,000 calories. I was stunned. I thought I was making good decisions in regard to my eating habits. I never would have predicted how far off track I was, mainly because I had never taken the time to observe nutrition facts. It was an honest mistake, and one that is common to make.
I faithfully tracked my food intake on a daily basis from the point on. It gave me perspective about the foods that I was consuming, and being able to see it broken down in this way allowed me to learn more about food than I’d ever known before, as well as how to make much better decisions for myself. (If you are looking for an easy way to track food, I recommend MyFitnessPal.) 5. Avoid your vices I love Doritos so much that I could eat an entire bag by myself, even now. Therefore, you will not find them in my pantry. The fact is that if I’m at home for the evening, already in my PJs, and looking for munchies, the likelihood of me craving Doritos SO badly that I would put on clothes and go buy some is pretty low. Whew! Dodged a bullet there, huh? Not really. If you know that a particular treat is too tempting for you to avoid, don’t buy it. It really is THAT simple. 6. Allow yourself to have treats (in moderation) It is likely that most doctors or nutrition specialists will disagree with what I’m about to say here, and they have all kinds of degrees and certifications to back up their reasons for dissent. I am merely speaking based on experience. With that said, you have to decide whether this particular tip is right for you or not. Throughout the entire process of my weight loss, from day one until now, I have allowed myself to have treat (in moderation). There is a reason that I gained as much weight as I did in the first place: I love food. I love pizza, burgers, cake, ice cream, potato chips, macaroni and cheese...yummmmmm-O! I could not expect after 26 years of indulging in these types of foods that my cravings for them would simply disappear. One of the reasons why people tend to fail at “dieting” is that they expect that they will suddenly fall in love with healthy food and salivate whenever they see a salad in front of them. That’s unrealistic. Being healthy isn’t about deprivation, it’s about developing an understanding of how your body reacts to a particular way of eating and moving. There is no standard to determine this, nor does it stay constant for an individual. When I first started this process, I allowed myself a “cheat meal” every fourth day IF (and only IF) I strictly met my calorie intake goals on the other three days. This worked for quite a while, and it allowed me to continue to have those treats without completely sabotaging the progress that I had already made. As time went on, and I lost more weight, I had to change this. Instead, I had cheat meals on the weekends only. Now, I have cheat meals once a week. There have been times when I’ve only had cheat meals once a month. Regardless of the method or frequency of them, allowing myself treats as a reward for being honest and true to my nutrition plan kept me from falling off of the wagon altogether. And honestly, it has also helped me determine which of those foods are truly worth my time (sorry, but some foods are no longer on my list--I think I’ll be content to never have another Big Mac in my life), and to savor them even more so when I can have them. 7. Be flexible I’ve never been able to figure out why, but lots of people treat their diets like it is a religion: once they establish faith in it, they see any other methods as heresy. The problem there is that diets are not deities and abandoning one for another will not condemn your soul to eternal damnation. In fact, it is exactly the opposite. Inevitably, at some point you will hit a plateau in which your weight loss comes screeching to a halt. This could last a few days, a few weeks, a few months...and after the loads of compliments that you’ve likely received as people have noticed the weight you’ve lost, suddenly not seeing results can feel like an open handed slap across the face. For some, this could cause complete loss of motivation. Although I might normally cringe at using a cliche, there is some merit in saying that insanity is “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” If you hit a plateau, maybe it is worth considering a different type of nutrition plan. Is there a possibility that it won’t end your plateau? Sure. But there’s also a possibility that remaining with the same strategy won’t either. 8. Plan meals Unlike any other species on the planet, human beings have a gift for expertly crafting excuses, and then mentally justifying them. Sometimes we do this without even realizing that we are doing so, especially when we are faced with the common and incredibly dangerous combination of being hungry, tired, and rushed. When it is 8:00 p.m., you’ve worked a very long day, and you know that you need to be in bed by 10:00 p.m. to effectively function for the events of the following day, it is easy and entirely justifiable (or so we convince ourselves) to order a pizza for dinner instead of making something that requires you to dirty multiple pots and pans. But imagine the same scenario in which a healthy meal is already prepared for you and requires only that you put it in the microwave for 5 minutes. Suddenly, you have no excuse to order that pizza, and you can revel in the pride of not ruining your diet for yet another day. So how does such an ideal situation come to fruition? By planning your meals in advance. For the last several years, I have made Sundays my "food prep" days. I sit down with my MyFitnessPal app and I plug in all of the foods that I intend on eating throughout the week. Then, I do whatever I need to do to be sure that those meals are easily accessible. Sometimes that involves cooking 4 pounds of chicken on the grill and packing it up in the appropriately measured increments. Or maybe it means making a huge bowl of salad with the tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers already mixed in. Does this take some time out of my day? Of course. However, once I started doing this, it became a science, and my “prep sessions” consumed less of my time on the weekend. Furthermore, those few hours on Sunday save me tons time for other things during the week, and, most importantly, prevents me from feeling the guilt of making unhealthy meal choices when I’m in a pinch. 9. Be firm, but fair There has to be a good balance between these two things. You have obligated yourself to a particular workout regimen and meal plan. You have to be able to recognize when you are making excuses to avoid them, and be firm enough with yourself to ignore the excuses. I cannot tell you how many times, even in the last week, that I could have told myself that I was too tired or too stressed out or felt too icky to go to the gym. However, I made myself go anyway, and every single time, I felt better afterward. Had I told myself that those excuses were sufficient reasons to skip the gym on any of those days, what would prevent me from using the same excuses tomorrow? When you allow extrinsic motivations like these to outweigh intrinsic motivations like holding yourself accountable for your own well being, it becomes habitual. So, you must make a determination: perhaps you are tired, but are you TOO tired to try? Perhaps you have a staggering pile of paperwork to complete, but is it so much work that you can’t afford to step away from it for an hour? Most of the time the answer to these questions is, “no.” With that said, you must also be fair with yourself. There ARE times when you should give yourself a break. Aside from work obligations, I’ve only skipped my regularly scheduled gym programming once in the last 6 months, and it was because I felt like I was legitimately going to vomit every time I stood up or moved. I feel like that was a pretty valid reason to not go do a bunch of burpees. However, if I had determined that it was just an uncomfortable bout of heartburn, I likely would have still gone. Personal excuses are an extremely powerful source of persuasion, and when you’ve spent much of your life using them avoid particular things (like physical fitness), it is dangerously easy to continue the pattern. You have to learn how to make the determination between legitimate reasons to leave the obligations you have set for yourself unfulfilled, and excuses to avoid them altogether. More often than not it is fair to say that they are excuses, and you should be firm enough with yourself to ignore them and do what you need to do for yourself. Excuses don’t produce results, only negative habits. Theodore Roosevelt once said, “Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty…” If you choose the path toward being a healthier you, it will require effort, you will experience pain, and it will be difficult, particularly in the beginning. But, true to Roosevelt’s words, it will also be worth it in more ways than you can ever imagine.
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