In the Starting Blocks

On the heels of the Men's 100m Finals - all hail Usain! - I think the title of today's post is quite applicable.  By the way, can we all just stop a second and admit that he is ridiculous? Any time I watch his run my jaw just drops - so impressive.

Anyway, if you read my post from yesterday, you know that I am now 28 years of age and am embarking on a year-long journey (a la Chris Powell) to get to my sub-200 pound goal. So before I get started, I want to establish where I'm starting. I'm adjusting my feet in the blocks and getting ready to tear up the track. (But of course this isn't being treated as a sprint!)

This morning I took stock of where I find myself after a week of vacation and a week + of slacking on my half marathon training schedule. And it was worse than I thought.

If any of you follow me on YouTube, you'll know that I also just joined a couple of challenges - so to speak - that require me to make regular update/progress videos. In my initial videos for #CHANGE and "Hot 4 Halloween" I made a guess before vacation that I weighed around 270 despite having not seen a scale for a week prior to that. Well...I must have been wrong. Here are my starting numbers as of today:

Starting Weight: 275.6

Measurements (in inches):

I took some 'before' pictures that I will show you at the end of each three-month "Phase" (again with the Chris Powell comparison). I will also be giving short, weekly reports each Monday letting you know how my last seven days went - mostly statistical with a little analysis. I'll also have a running, weekly, weigh in tally in the upper-right portion of the blog.

I also want to note that I don't want to stray too far from the running focus of this blog, but that shouldn't be a problem since I'll be continuing my half marathon training this next month and using it as a huge part of my weight loss. My ultimate goal after all of this is done is to become a hardcore runner (like some of you!) and maybe even dabble in some du- or triathlons. Hmm? Hmm?

But let's take this one day at a time, k? I'll have my first progress post for ya on Monday.

Weekly Update #2

If you haven't heard, I'm doing weekly progress updates on my YouTube channel. Now I've tried doing this type of thing before, but I would just cowardly fade away once I started doing poorly. Let's not let that happen this time around, shall we?

Anyway, I'm just about done with quite the whirlwind of a week, and unfortunately it took a toll on my activity levels and discipline along the way. Had a wrench thrown in my routine - had to take a personal day off of work due to a death in the family, was asked to work from home twice this week, and even worked from a different office for a day. All these things threw curveballs at me and I wasn't ready.

When I can settle into a routine and know ahead of time what I have coming up, it gives me a better chance to plan out my meals and gym times. When things get kind of hectic and are thrown off-kilter, it gives me less time and warning to plan things out. With less time to plan, I'm more susceptible to giving in to spontaneous temptations (snacking, sleeping in) and therefore sabotaging my goals.

But the B-Side of that is that when I DO give in to the temptations of immediate gratification, I continue to give in the next time, and the time after that - each instance where I display a lack of discipline makes it easier to give in the following time. That's where the change needs to happen.

I mean, let's face it - no one rarely anyone can keep on point 100% of the time. We all mess up at one time or another! It's how we respond to that lapse in discipline that defines our journey and self-control. For me, it's been a week of good, followed by a bad Saturday, followed by a bad week, which turns into two weeks... You get the point.

That is the piece of the puzzle that I need to figure out for when these lapses come. Once I learn to stop the bleeding once the cut occurs, I'll be in great shape when the next temptation comes around.

Business vs Pleasure

STOP! If you'd rather WATCH my video instead of READ my post, click here!

Mindset is KEY to forming new habits and lifestyle changes. Bottom line.

Fellow weight loss vlogger Greg talks often on his YouTube channel about 'minding the big picture' and making sure that your mind is on board with your efforts when trying to lose weight. By keeping the overall goal in mind, your actions should then follow suit and guide your decisions day-to-day, meal-by meal. And (theoretically) each decision should get easier and more engrained in your daily efforts as you continue to make good choices. (It's no wonder he destroyed 80+ pounds in under a year with insight like that!)


And eventually, when you see progress from all your efforts, everything starts to seem more like fun and less like hard work!


That's what I'm looking forward to - seeing the gym as a place I look forward to going to rather than loathing since it seems like endless work. Each early morning wake-up is still a task, and some days I get side-tracked and distracted by Facebook and YouTube enough to where I don't even MAKE it to the gym! For some reason I allow myself to use pathetic and petty excuses to keep myself from doing the appropriate amount of sweating in the morning to get closer to my weight loss goals. 

All in all, my mind is on board with the IDEA of losing weight, sweating and having to buy smaller clothes, but for some reason my mind and actions aren't rallying together and saying, 'Hey, why don't we do all the stuff we know we need to do to not feel like a bag of s#!*?"

Waking up at 5:30am is no fun...

In reality, the only way I'm going to get in the habit of going to the gym and eventually have FUN getting up to go to the gym, is to (say it with me) - JUST DO IT! 99.9% of the time I have no real, legit excuse as to why I can't make it to the gym at 6:00 in the morning. It's not like I have a lot of things vying for that time of the day!

So for now, sure! If I have to view gym visits as business and hard work, so be it! It's something that NEEDS to get done day in and day out - just like a job. But once the clothes get looser and I can run more miles, I'll WANT to get to the gym to see how much more I can do!

It's all about your mindset. So as Matt Damon said in the movie Green Zone, (language warning -->) "Get your f'ing game face on!"