I didn't do either. I thought a lot about doing one on Thursday, though, but decided that I would just count this belay class I was taking that night as my workout, and then do the extra workout I needed to squeeze in sometime Fri or Sat. Unfortunately, the class was so easy I couldn't call it a workout in good conscience. Time to scrap starting the workout that week and just start over again the following Monday. And then I got a brutal cold and cough, knocking me out until Wed. And I haven't convinced myself to start up again since...
I decided, though, that instead of making it my goal to finish P90X, I'd make it my goal to become fit. And I still hope to do P90X to help get there, but this way if I miss a couple days here and there, I might be messing up the minor goal of "Finish All Workouts," but I'm still doing fine as far as my end-goal is concerned. And the end-goal is really really the more important one.
So, in order to achieve my new end-goal, I've made a couple sub-goals.
1- We actually tend to eat out pretty often. It's crazy. And half of it is my own fault! There might be a lot of days where everyone's been at work all day, we haven't planned anything special for dinner, and there's only three of us at home, so it's just so nice and easy to grab some fast food for dinner really quick, but there's at least equal opportunities where I'm hanging out with friends and we decide to go out for lunch or dinner. It's terrible. So, in accordance with the rules of the nutrition half of P90X, I'm going to strive to not eat out more than 3x a week. Whether that's fast food or a real sit-down restaurant. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. Take out or deliver. And not more than one meal out a day. I hope there will be plenty of weeks where I don't hit the 3-meal limit.
2- Drink enough water each day. The rule to decide how much you're supposed to drink is half your body weight in ounces, yes? Yes. So I will start drinking that much. (I just spent quite a while contemplating actually stating how much water that would be. If I tell everyone, then it would only be a couple quick calculations for the curious to find out how much I weigh, which gives me really mixed feelings. If I don't tell you, then regardless of what the outcome is, I can still tell everyone that I'm happy with how things turned out and this is exactly where I saw myself being. Which might end up being true, but could also be a lie. But it gives the impression of success. If everyone knows how much I weigh-- or has the potential to know-- then you'd all be able to judge much easier how I'm doing on my goals. It would force me to try something and either have it work or have it fail. And if it fails, then I can't pretend that it worked. If I gave up, then I'd have to own that. But if it worked, then that would be real results I have. It would give the impression of honesty. So as uncomfortable as this prospect is, every ounce of logic I have is telling me it must be said.) That means I'm looking at about 2.75 Nalgenes a day. I feel like some days this will get rounded up to 3, and others it will be rounded down to 2.5. I find that acceptable.
3- Start up P90X again, starting Monday. I have everything all prepped up and ready to go. I'm actually going to get offline pretty soon here and clean my room, so I'll have enough space. Also, someone is coming to take pictures of the house, and so I should have clean rooms for that purpose, as well. Pending a day comes around where I'm having troubles motivating myself to do a full-on X workout, I will take Jack for a walk. I know that's incredibly less active, but it's better than just giving up for the day and feeling bad about myself. And, with him, I walk pretty briskly, so it would be enough that I wouldn't consider my day a workout-waste.
4- This one doesn't quite seem to fit on this list at first glance, but it really does when you think about it: Get off of electronics (defined as the computer and TV) by 9 pm. The thing is, during the day, when there's sunlight out, I can usually convince myself to do something productive. But when the sun sets (which I know is well before 9 at this time of year), I'm pretty much done doing anything productive. At that point, there will be no more cleaning or working out or cooking meals that take more than two minutes to make. At sunset, it's time to relax and enjoy some down time of watching TV, checking facebook, reading leisurely, whatever. But if I decide to get online or watch TV, I will not hesitate to stay there until 4 or 5 in the morning, regardless of how tired I am or how many hours it's been since I had something new to look at.
This way, I'm still allowing myself to have a couple hours to watch TV or be on facebook or iwastesomuchtime or dbpb, but after 9, I must get off of the electronics and read or write or sit and ponder life or stargaze or whatever. That way, when I actually get tired, I will go to sleep. The only exception is if I want to watch a movie before bed, but in that case, I'll start it by 8:30, and the TV goes off as soon as it's over.
Thus ends my list. This is how I intend to improve my health. Once I have all these things down, I can make higher goals (maybe try taking out junk food as well as fast food, and then someday move that on to eating healthy food, etc). But I've tried just jumping in before. And it's worked for weeks at a time, and I've seen it change my life, but I just stop. It's like I was only pretending to be healthy, I wasn't actually changing. Haha, as soon as I see any kind of improvement I think, "Oh, good! My 'new lifestyle' is working! Now I can ease back into my life of unhealthitude and STILL keep improving!" Hm. Not quite... But this is actually just changing and being healthier-- no more pretending.
Though, should I lose motivation, does anyone have any advice of how they kept themselves looking at the bigger goal?
5 comments:
If there's anything I can do to help, let me know. That eating out part is bad, I know. I would be willing to do menus again, as long as it's not tough stuff to fix. It's just not worth it to fix a big ol' anything since there's only three of us here to eat it, and especially if any one or two of us aren't going to be around cuz then the remaining ones of us will be eating it till it grows fur and ends up getting tossed. But if you want to put stuff on the list that you know will be eaten, I'm game to try to eat more healthily too.
And I agree with your post that ANY movement is better than NO movement, even if it isn't quite up to P90X standards.
My first rule for working out that whenever I do work out, I don't beat myself up for not working out more or for not working out yesterday.
I'm not really an authority on eating right. My approach to that is to not think about it too much. I eat a lot of meat and a lot of veggies. When I want something else, I eat it (but I only eat a little bit. Usually). I try not to have too many sugary foods on hand. But of course there's some... my current favorite sweet-tooth foods are Greek yogurt with honey and yogurt covered raisins.
Anyway, my point was this: the simpler a plan is and the less guilt that's involved, the easier it is for me to stick with it. YMMV.
Oh, and second rule for working out: do SOMETHING.
I don't really have a third rule for working out.
Haha thanks :) To both of you of. YMMV?
Don't worry, I googled it. Ha.
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