Slacking Off Just Before the Deadline

The date for the completion of my one year goal rolls around in 6 weeks time. As I draw closer to the date there are a few things that I have come to realise:

1. I am not going to reach my original goal.
2. Even if I did, I will not look how I envisioned at that bodyfat percentage.
3. I will reach my goal, and even better ones, but it will take a bit longer.

My goal was to reach 25% body fat by 7th July 2007. A few weeks ago I made realision 2 that 25% would not be anywhere near the kind of look that I have in my head of exactly what I want to be like. As I learn more about bodyfat and talk with others in my new gym I now see that I will need to have a percentage in my teens before I get there.

Summer is here and I'm still at 30% body fat. On the other hand I've dropped around 10%, losing 25lbs in the process. I have been keeping track of my progress over the year and today I made myself a line chart. I can clearly see that I made great progress for the first few months, had a large blip around Christmas, stumbled my way through the early part of this year and then got back on track and have been making good progress since then. So this leads me to realisation number 3. I can lose fat, I don't have to be perfect, I can skip workouts sometimes, I can eat takeaways sometimes, I can have a normal life and still make progress.

So, my beloved summer is upon us and I intend to enjoy it. I have more social events during the summer so I wont be eating perfectly all the time. Not only that but over the last few months I have become so obsessed with reaching my goal by my deadline that I've been overdoing it with the exercise. At one point I actually tried working out three times in one day. That is just too much. I'm not an athlete. I'm an ordinary person with a day job, a family, a social life and lots of interests. Fat loss is a goal, it is not my entire life.

So, I've decided to relax. I'm going to try to exercise daily but I'm dropping two of my cardio sessions and one of my weight training sessions to give me time to work on some of my other interests (software development). I'm going to continue with my current eating plan as normal but I'm not going to obsess over it. I'll continue to improve recipes and look for new ones but I'll also continue to enjoy my social life and eat out now and then without feeling guilty.

The fat will come off and it will do so slowly. It wont be linear but overall, it will move in the right direction. I find myself in a position now where I have confidence in my ability to lose fat safely. It's not easy but I really don't have to kill myself to do it so I can finally just relax a bit and enjoy all that life has to offer, and not just my new gym!

I Lost 2 Stones Today ... In My Head

I have a long drive to and from work. The traffic lights are not working at one of the roundabouts at the moment and it took me over an hour to get in this morning, ugh! Tonight it took 45 minutes to get home. On these long drives I quite often find myself drifting along on auto-pilot. I'll suddenly come to my senses and find that I haven't heard any of my music for the last half an hour or so.

This happened to me tonight on the way home. Last week I dropped to my lowest weight in years and I am really starting to see and feel the difference. I've had really good workouts all week long and my goals are starting to feel more real and achievable every day. I'm always visualising about the future and these days 95% of the time I'm day dreaming about either fat loss goals or karate.

Tonight I actually took it one step further than usual. I was driving along and suddenly I caught myself planning out my blog entry announcing my weight loss of 2 stones! I haven't lost 28lbs yet, only 22 so I'm a way off yet but in my mind I had already done it. I didn't even realise I was doing this and when I caught myself I actually felt a bit embarassed because it seemed rather silly but when I thought about it and realised that it's not silly; it's incredibly powerful.

Everything that is manifested in the real world starts of as a thought in the creative faculty of the mind. What the mind can conceive and believe the mind can achieve (Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich.) Not only do I believe that I can reach my goals but I can visualise them so clearly that I can experience the feelings as if they were really happening right now. I can see every detail of how I look, the clothes I'm wearing, the way I've changed my hair, the things other people say to me, and of course how all of this makes me feel. I can feel it with such intensity that I'm able to put it into words as a blog entry. I could write it right now!

The reason I believe this is such a powerful thing is that the mind does not distinguish between thoughts that are in the past, present or future, and the mind does not distinguish between thoughts that are real and those that are not. What you think about the most you move towards. The predominant thoughts in your mind will manifest themselves in the physical world. And no, I don't mean by magic!

We have literally billions of thoughts and inputs entering our lives every day. All the things we see, hear, feel etc as well as all of the thoughts that go on in our mind enter our brains daily. Our brains are neural networks - networks of neurons. All the billions of neurons are linked together to billions of others. When all these inputs, senses and thoughts come in some of those neurons will be fired along pathways to other neurons. When this happens the pathway is physically strengthened. This makes it easier to fire off those same neurons again in the future. Similarly if particular neurons cease to be fired, pathways from them will eventually weaken.

Enough of the AI lesson... The point is that the thoughts you think about the most will strengthen in your mind and will become more predominant in your mind in the future. If you continually focus on what a big fat failure you are, you'll strengthen all neurons and pathways relating to that making it much easier to feel that way in the future. Do the opposite and feed your mind positive thoughts and good things happen. The other important thing to understand is that thoughts that have high emotional intensity will fire much more strongly in the brain and this is where my blog entry story comes in...

You see I am able to visualise with such clarity that I can experience all those emotions and feelings right now. Aside from making me feel good and motivating me, its strengthening those neurons baby! Every time I do this I bring myself closer and closer to manifesting it in the real world. In a few weeks time I will be back here making that blog entry for real :)

How do I know this for sure? Well I must have graduated from Uni with a First Class Honors degree about a thousand times in my mind before it happened for real. I focused on that goal so intently for three years that it would have been impossible for me to fail. The best student award was just icing on the cake. I wonder what my icing will be for my fat loss goals?

Exciting stuff. Visualise. Have complete Faith. Achieve anything you want.