Why should you change your lifestyle if there is no personal incentive, you need a dream
A valuable lesson is having a goal that will stretch you, and holding yourself to account for achieving it. Make it something so exciting that you will make sacrifices to achieve it.
Click here to follow the res of My Weight Loss Journey
In January 2018 I was still 16st 8lb, the result of beer and BBQs every night and living in the great outdoors down under. As you can see from the photo, I still had a long way to go.
The NZ trip wasn’t all fun, there had been a work element to it and whilst there we had discussed me returning for a longer work trip later in the year.
Finding the dream
Unconnected but relevant, my eldest lad had been surfing off a boat in Bali the previous year and I couldn’t believe that he had achieved such a dream experience. It then occurred to me that if I was heading to NZ I could stop off in Bali and try surfing off a boat. This was an enormous stretch from where I was at that moment, but I wanted it.
I had a goal and I went public with all my pals – “I am going surfing from one of those boats in Bali this year, just like in the videos”, and that meant getting myself sorted and this time I would lose weight.
The Man v Fat football hadn’t really helped me much at this stage, but it was largely because I’d hardly played in the previous 4 months. I bought the ManVFat book and read up on the weight loss techniques and it was quite clear to me that the only way to deal with my weight was calorie counting. I already has an exercise watch that tracked my activity and calories that I was burning, so I just needed to start counting what was going in.
I downloaded the myfitnesspal app that enabled calories tracking and got started.
I had to deal with a few more things, firstly I had to find time to go to the gym, I hate mornings but manged to coax myself there for 8.30 am and got used to it. I had an emotional issue that I felt I was letting my staff down as I wasn’t the first one in the office every day, so I started to view the time at the gym as work prep time not leisure time.
I then had to deal with my lifestyle when not in the office, working away and travelling. So I developed a “calorie trading” technique, so if I was away and wanted to have a couple of beers watching the football, I would “earn the right” by going for a 1 hour walk to earn the 450 kcals that would be in the beer.
Finally there was my all round fitness, a cortisone injection and physio fixed my shoulder but it also highlighted that my core wasn’t particularly strong from all the sitting around, so I did loads of situps. Not surprisingly I ended up with a knackered back, another 4 week layoff from running but I kept going to the gym doing any exercise I could to burn calories.
I had a dream and I was going to make it and nothing was going to get in my way.
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