Monday 4 August 2014

It's a New Week: What Are You Doing with It?


(If you are in the US, yesterday was the beginning of the new week. The US starts the week on Sunday, but the UK begins the week on Monday. For the purposes of this blog post, I am using the UK definition of the first day of the week.)

Today is the start of a completely new week. Are you happy with your fitness? Are you happy with your health? Are you happy with your body?

While I hope your answers to those questions are all going to be "yes," if your answer is "no" to any of those questions, I have another question to ask you.

What are you doing today, and the rest of this week, to make sure that you are going to be closer to your fitness, health and body goals next week?

You can spend this week wishing that you were slimmer, stronger, and healthier. And when you get to this time next week, you will be no closer to that goal. A better idea is to take steps towards getting yourself more fit, stronger, healthier and slimmer and to take those steps today and tomorrow and the next day - and all the way through the week, so that this time next week, you will be closer to where you want to be.

When I was at my highest weight, I had many friends who were also overweight, some of them even more overweight than I was at the time. One of them started trying to get fit. She started working towards losing weight and working towards getting the body she wanted. A year later, she had lost 145 pounds. She still had quite a bit of weight left to lose to reach her goal, but I was struck by one thought; if I had started working towards losing weight and getting fit back when she had started, I would have already been at my goal weight. A year had already passed, and I had done nothing towards my goal and gotten no closer to it. This thought really annoyed me; although I was very happy for my friend, I was annoyed with myself.

Then I found out I was pregnant. The idea of waiting even longer before I could get fit was unthinkable to me. That's when I started working out and eating healthily. And the weight came off. It took a long time. I lost the first 100 pounds in one year, but it took another 9 months to lose the last 45 pounds. But I did it. I reached my goal weight.

If I hadn't started working towards that goal when I did, I might still be the same morbidly obese weight that I started at.

I find I am having to remind myself of this though. I've been letting my former bad habits sneak back in and my weight is trying to creep back up on me. I don't feel as healthy or as strong as I did a few years ago. So I'm going to do something about it today, and every day this week. And then I'm going to continue doing something about it.

What are you doing today?