I am 5 feet 11 inches tall and weigh 218 pounds. Ya, I'm just a bit over weight. About 40 pounds over weight to be exact. I've been pondering loosing the extra flab for a few years, but I am finally doing something about it this year.
Over the years I've been collecting a lot of useless facts about dieting and loosing weight and storing them away in the file cabinet in my head.
Facts such as:
1. If you are hungry while you are dieting, that is really bad. It's best to eat every two hours so your body gets used to the idea that there is plenty of food, so your metabolism will rise and your body will burn more fat. But if you allow yourself to go hungry, your body begins to believe there is a shortage of food and your metabolism will slow to save your fat stores for when there is nothing left to eat.
2. A diet is absolutely useless unless you exercise. It doesn't really matter what kind of exercise you do, just as long as you will either raise your heart rate above 120 beats per minute for a half hour a day or build muscle, or both if you wish. But the most important part of the exercise you chose is that you enjoy it.
3. Three pounds of new muscle burns as many calories as running 1 mile
per day.
4. Water is an extremely important part of any diet. It helps to clean out all the waist and toxins.
5. Although walking helps, it should never be used as your only form of exercise unless you're race walking.
I called these useless facts because what ever knowledge you have in your head is totally useless unless you put them into action. And I haven't been putting this knowledge into action until January 2nd of this year. Why? Because I discovered that in order to tackle the really big fat challenges in life, you have to contend with your subconscious mind first.
You need to be able to get your subconscious ready for the fight, but that is not all that is required. You also need to reaffirm the subconscious every day preferably twice a day. Once in the morning as soon as you get out of bed and once before you go to sleep.
The way I do it is by using a technique which is fully described in a book called "Think and Grow Rich" by a gentleman named Napoleon Hill. This book is the original self help book and despite its cheesy title, the ideas in it are not just for getting rich. They're about being successful, no matter what your definition of success is.
Anyway, I wrote out 5 statements.
1. I stated my goal. I chose a specific weight goal which I came to through a little research
2. I wrote out a statement on how I will use my success to help others. This is important because, according to the theory, you need to pay back what you "demand" from life and how you do that is by helping others along the way.
3. I then wrote a statement of the specific date when I plan to reach my goal.
4. Then I formulated a plan of exactly how I plan to go about doing what I need to do in order to reach my goal.
5. Finally, I wrote out one single statement summarizing everything I had written in steps 1 through 4.
I make a point to read these statements twice a day. Trust me, I'm no angel. I have already had failures, but a part of the struggle for success is recognizing that there will be failures and know that you just have to get back on your horse and keep trying.
So far the system is working. I started on January 2nd and am still following my workout schedule faithfully and eating as healthy as the plan I made says although I tend to struggle with my caloric intake on the weekends. Even then I have already lost 15 pounds and am doing nearly twice as many push-ups and sit-ups as was my maximum when I first started out.
It is said that when you first start a workout that you need to get in shape before you get in shape. Sound funny? It really isn't if you think about it. If you're that out of shape, which I was, you need to get your body to a point where it can carry your great big fat frame easily enough to take the grueling exercise of actually getting in good shape.
After three months of light exercise I'm finally at that point where I can begin to push myself every day.
I'll be checking in every now and again to let everyone know how things are going and maybe I'll have a new exciting goal in the future.
Monday, March 26, 2007
Saturday, March 10, 2007
Lessons in Character
On June 20, 1933, Ernest took another look at his father as he left the house. Ernest's heart broke at the sight of his father standing on the porch with his shoulders slumped and his posture broken. His father promised his mother the world, but as a poor farmer, he was unable to deliver.
No matter how hard he worked, Ernest's father was never able to get his family out of squalor. His life, he felt, was a total failure.
In the past, Ernest tried to talk his father into a new business idea, but his father dismissed the idea as ridiculous, because that type of business was illegal the United States.
After Ernest left, the old farmer went into the house and picked up his pistol and walked out to the field where his wife was working and shot her in the back of the head. He then went back into the house and took his own life.
If only Ernest's father had learned the lesson that a man named R. U. Darby had learned years before, maybe he would have looked at the situation a little differently.
R. U. Darby was employed by his uncle to go to Colorado to help dig up a gold vein he had found. They got loans from family and friends to buy the equipment they needed to bring up the gold and when they got to Colorado, they got straight to work. They brought up enough gold to pay off all of their loans, but shortly after, the vein disappeared. They dug around, but where unable to find any more gold.
Discouraged, they sold all of their equipment and the land to a junk man for a few hundred dollars. The junk man hired an engineer to look at the mine and he discovered that, because of a fault line, the gold vein was broken in half and the rest of the gold would be found just three feet below where R. U. Darby and his uncle stopped digging and the junk man went on to become a millionaire many times over.
Mr. Darby now had a choice to make. He could have wallowed in his failure and suffered on his cross of discouragement, or he could have learned from his choice to give up.
How many times are we faced with this choice? Sometimes we find ourselves in a period of despair and discouragement. Maybe we have just experienced a catastrophic failure in our lives. The failure may seem to be so great that it may take the rest of our lives just to recover.
How easy is it to throw our hands up and say, "I quit"? How easy would it be to just go home and sit in front of the T.V. and make no attempt to redeem ourselves, after a hug failure?
How hard is it to pick ourselves up after a humiliating defeat? How hard is it to face the same struggles that have embarrassed and humiliated us in the past?
We all know that the former is much easier to do, but it is the latter that makes us what we are as human beings. If we decide, against the odds, that we are going to go back for more abuse and pain and humiliation, all in the name of some kind of success, it is then that we are making the greatest investment in ourselves.
Education is great. You can do a lot, if you are educated. Work experience is also wonderful. But, the best investment we can make in ourselves is an investment in character.
Character is the basic building block of success. And the only way you can develop character is through the use of courage and persistence. If you have the courage to get up off the ground, and try again, and you have the persistence to get up off the ground no matter how many times you fall, you will develop very strong character and you will ultimately succeed. And more then likely, your success will be far greater then you ever expected.
In many stories, surveys, interviews and studies of the most successful people in the world, we find that many of them have faced the most difficult and catastrophic failures just before they realized there greatest successes.
It is these failures and disappointments that develop our character and ultimately make us successful in all of our endeavors. The motivational speaker and author Napoleon Hill said it best when he wrote "Every adversity, every failure and every heartache carries with it the seed of an equivalent or a greater benefit"
R. U. Darby learned this very well. He decided to take the road of character development. He created a slogan for himself which he repeated as often as he could. He said "I stopped three feet from gold, but I never stop because men say no". When ever things looked bleakest to him, he decided to "dig three more feet". As a result he became one of the leading insurance sails men in the country, making annual profits of well over a million dollars.
If Ernest's father had only learned this lesson and just waited five more months before falling victim to despair, he would have been able to be a part of the venture that Ernest and his brother started. They where raisin farmers, like their father. And when prohibition was repealed, only five months after their parents' death, they went to the local library and found a recipe for wine. They stopped growing grapes for raisins and began making wine. Despite having to compete with over 800 other wineries in California alone, Ernest and Julio Gallo where able to build one of the largest wine producers in the world.
No matter how hard he worked, Ernest's father was never able to get his family out of squalor. His life, he felt, was a total failure.
In the past, Ernest tried to talk his father into a new business idea, but his father dismissed the idea as ridiculous, because that type of business was illegal the United States.
After Ernest left, the old farmer went into the house and picked up his pistol and walked out to the field where his wife was working and shot her in the back of the head. He then went back into the house and took his own life.
If only Ernest's father had learned the lesson that a man named R. U. Darby had learned years before, maybe he would have looked at the situation a little differently.
R. U. Darby was employed by his uncle to go to Colorado to help dig up a gold vein he had found. They got loans from family and friends to buy the equipment they needed to bring up the gold and when they got to Colorado, they got straight to work. They brought up enough gold to pay off all of their loans, but shortly after, the vein disappeared. They dug around, but where unable to find any more gold.
Discouraged, they sold all of their equipment and the land to a junk man for a few hundred dollars. The junk man hired an engineer to look at the mine and he discovered that, because of a fault line, the gold vein was broken in half and the rest of the gold would be found just three feet below where R. U. Darby and his uncle stopped digging and the junk man went on to become a millionaire many times over.
Mr. Darby now had a choice to make. He could have wallowed in his failure and suffered on his cross of discouragement, or he could have learned from his choice to give up.
How many times are we faced with this choice? Sometimes we find ourselves in a period of despair and discouragement. Maybe we have just experienced a catastrophic failure in our lives. The failure may seem to be so great that it may take the rest of our lives just to recover.
How easy is it to throw our hands up and say, "I quit"? How easy would it be to just go home and sit in front of the T.V. and make no attempt to redeem ourselves, after a hug failure?
How hard is it to pick ourselves up after a humiliating defeat? How hard is it to face the same struggles that have embarrassed and humiliated us in the past?
We all know that the former is much easier to do, but it is the latter that makes us what we are as human beings. If we decide, against the odds, that we are going to go back for more abuse and pain and humiliation, all in the name of some kind of success, it is then that we are making the greatest investment in ourselves.
Education is great. You can do a lot, if you are educated. Work experience is also wonderful. But, the best investment we can make in ourselves is an investment in character.
Character is the basic building block of success. And the only way you can develop character is through the use of courage and persistence. If you have the courage to get up off the ground, and try again, and you have the persistence to get up off the ground no matter how many times you fall, you will develop very strong character and you will ultimately succeed. And more then likely, your success will be far greater then you ever expected.
In many stories, surveys, interviews and studies of the most successful people in the world, we find that many of them have faced the most difficult and catastrophic failures just before they realized there greatest successes.
It is these failures and disappointments that develop our character and ultimately make us successful in all of our endeavors. The motivational speaker and author Napoleon Hill said it best when he wrote "Every adversity, every failure and every heartache carries with it the seed of an equivalent or a greater benefit"
R. U. Darby learned this very well. He decided to take the road of character development. He created a slogan for himself which he repeated as often as he could. He said "I stopped three feet from gold, but I never stop because men say no". When ever things looked bleakest to him, he decided to "dig three more feet". As a result he became one of the leading insurance sails men in the country, making annual profits of well over a million dollars.
If Ernest's father had only learned this lesson and just waited five more months before falling victim to despair, he would have been able to be a part of the venture that Ernest and his brother started. They where raisin farmers, like their father. And when prohibition was repealed, only five months after their parents' death, they went to the local library and found a recipe for wine. They stopped growing grapes for raisins and began making wine. Despite having to compete with over 800 other wineries in California alone, Ernest and Julio Gallo where able to build one of the largest wine producers in the world.
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