Consistency

It's clear that I need to be more consistent with my general fitness and nutrition. Looking back, I've always had fits and starts with working out and eating right. I tend to function in extremes and would set forth short term weight loss goals and races to get me going. Ultimately, I always fell back into  bad habits when every day stress would creep in. While frustrating, I'm sure this resonates with a lot of people.

Back in March, while I was on a work trip in Vancouver I stepped on the scale in my fancy hotel room and practically barfed when I saw the number on the scale. Worse, my stress levels were high, energy levels low and looking back, I was probably borderline depressed (I was on the road a lot, working long hours and missing my family). I knew my current state of living wasn't going to be sustainable.

That evening, I went to the gym and ran 30 minutes on the treadmill. I actually didn't 'run', I 'shuffled' for 30 minutes to complete a seemingly measly 2.1 miles but I didn't care. Honestly, at the time, I had to pat myself on the back for actually finding the motivation. 

7 weeks later, I feel a million times better. It's always tough for me to get started and re-train my body and mind to commit to regular exercise and deliberate healthy nutrition. It's been really tough and I think what I've learned this time around is to make more reasonable goals. Rather than committing to a specific running pace or miles per week goal, I gave myself "any type of workout" time goals.

This graph shows my total running and strength training time invested per week since I started back in mid-March.

While I'm not making any MPW goals, this graph makes me smile because it simply shows that I've been logging miles : ) The week of the March 26 I had the flu so I was out for a 4 days. It was pretty miserable!

In terms of nutrition, I started counting calories and making myself a bit crazy, frankly. I kept a journal and tried to keep meticulous track of my consumption and did great for a while. Now, I'm just tracking what I eat and how often I eat - it's much more manageable. At the end of the day, I'm trying to drop a few pounds so it's important that I don't let myself astray. My biggest weaknesses: portion control and stress/emotional eating. 

 

Again, I don't want to focus too much on getting to my goal weight but I am tracking it to help motivate me. Since mid-March I've lost 9 lbs - and sad to say, I've got 10 lbs to go. It's tough to lost a pound a week at my size but it must be done. My real goal I suppose, is maintaining my goal weight!

Alright, enough of the charts and graphs. The point in documenting it is simply to aknowledge my progress - it's been hard work and I'm always looking to find ways to stay motivated. Of course, it helps that I have a ton more energy and really feel great :)

The next topic and arguably more interesting one is my vegan experiment...