Tag: ‘weight loss’
June 25, 2007 at 10:10 am
When I first started losing weight almost two and a half years ago, it was rather daunting that my estimates said it would take two years to reach my goal. I’m glad I underestimated the amount of time it would take. If I’d known how long I’d be weighing-in waiting for 160 to show up on my scale, I would have been even more bummed. While the size of the task in front of me seemed bigger than I was, I think it was also an advantage because I always knew this would require long-term dedication. I was going to spend as much time on this project as I could have getting an Associate Degree. If I’d done both I would look really cute in my nurse’s outfit right now.
When people only have a small amount of weight to lose, say 10 or 20 pounds, they aren’t typically as serious about changing their lifestyle as I had to be. They see weight-loss as a short-term project, like repainting a room, whereas I had to [...]
May 23, 2007 at 10:28 am
Sometimes people ask me how I get motivated. How did you get motivated to lose weight? How do you motivate yourself to exercise? What motivates you to keep eating healthy? And doesn’t the word “motivate” start to sound really weird after you keep saying it over and over again? Motivate, motivate, motivate.
The only answer I can come up with is, “Screw motivation.” If I waited until I was motivated to do my dishes, I’d have plates stacked up on my counter so high that I couldn’t open the microwave. Which I currently do. I’m never motivated to do my dishes. Yet I turn on the faucet and break out the dish soap anyway. It’s not because I want to have fun with bubbles, it’s because I have to. How am I supposed to make my morning oatmeal if the microwave has more restricted access than the Mexican border? My only other option would be to go to Goodwill every week and buy more plates, which I’d have to wash anyway. That store is dirty, y’all. [...]
April 17, 2007 at 9:22 am
I’m glad I didn’t have to lose weight back in the 80′s or 70′s, and not just because I missed that whole Jazzercise craze. Occasionally I get e-mails from women in their 40′s or 50′s who’ve lost a lot of weight and tell me they only wish they’d been able to do it sooner in their lives like I have. I don’t think it’s fair to compare because I have several advantages over them that come from existing farther down the time stream.
I loves me the Internets. A lot of the information I have learned about fitness and exercise is from articles I’ve read online. Even though I didn’t start using the Internet until high school, it’s difficult to remember a time when I wasn’t skimming my eyeballs across an Internet browser for at least an hour or more a day. I think I was dependent on the World Book Encyclopedia for most school research projects, which was more readable and shorter than the huge Encyclopedia Britannica. It even had pictures! Now if I’m curious [...]
March 30, 2007 at 10:36 am
The biography of my early childhood was written in T-shirts touting my accomplishments. The white ringer tee with the calculator on the front was from the time I competed in Mathletes. The pink shirt with the panda bear was from the time I sold over 200 Girl Scout cookies to frat boys. The dark blue Floyd’s Fork Farm long-sleeved tee was from the high school camping trip where half the class got drunk and smoked pot and we got the trip banned for the next four years. My brother had gotten one of those shirts two years earlier and it confused me because I thought forks came from Bed, Bath and Beyond and not from a farm. I was gently informed that it referred to a farm near a fork in Floyd’s river.
When I was scavenging the Goodwill racks earlier this week, I found a shirt from someone else’s biography. It was a brown tee from the French Broad River Rafting Expeditions. I’ve never been rafting, nor did I know where the French Broad River [...]
February 19, 2007 at 10:22 am
Ever since starting a weight loss blog, I find myself relating things to weight loss that I might not have otherwise. For instance, I read an article last week in New York Magazine about how it’s better to praise kids for working hard than for being naturally talented. The basic premise is that if kids think they’re doing well because they’re simply smart, when they attack a problem they can’t solve they will quit because they don’t want to disprove the fact that they’re smart. Because if they were smart, they’d automatically be able to do it, right? If you praise kids for working hard, they will be more likely to keep working on a problem even if it’s difficult.
That’s a pretty interesting exploration in the power of belief all in itself. But there was this interesting nugget on page 4 too:
But it turns out that the ability to repeatedly respond to failure by exerting more effort—instead of simply giving up—is a trait well studied in psychology. People with this trait, persistence, rebound well and [...]
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