February 9th - More motivation musings Well this is take 2 - the last effort froze up and got lost.  Therefore, I am writing this again, with hopefully much of the same information. I am now going into Week 5 of my healthy eating, with nary a glitch in my motivation.  Why? How? I hear you ask.  The answer is that I'm not entirely sure, and therefore I'm not sure if I should feel proud or lucky.  I will settle for a mixture of the two. More seriously though, if I try to identify some probable contributors, I think my religious tracking has probably helped.  I've read other people's journals and they are very clear that remaining vigilant is very important when trying to change old habits.  It's also clear that not tracking and relapses are very closely related (although it's not clear which comes first).  Therefore I have been very fastidious in my tracking. To do this I created a worksheet in Excel that I fill out daily, and then tally up weekly totals and averages for the Fat, Calorie and Point total.  I also keep my weight and measurements on there.  It's great to see it there in front of me.  I create a new sheet for each week, so the little tabs at the bottom of the page are building up.  As you know, Friday is my home weigh-in day, and the scales said 78kgs to me.  That means a 1.5kg loss since last Friday's 79.5.  That was actually the same as the week before, so I've broken my mini plateau.  It really reinforces my thoughts which I wrote about earlier in the piece about not panicking about plateaus.  Now I realise it wasn't a very long plateau, but nonetheless my motivation didn't waver at all.  I attribute that to my ongoing focus on health. Oh, that's right.  I meant to mention about my health.  I'm still feeling wonderfully healthy.  At the end of March I will go back to the doctor and get my cholesterol re-checked.  I would expect that it would reduce significantly from the 6.3 I scored last time.  A lower result will really help to keep my motivation up.  It's very clear to me that unless I get healthy and stay healthy, I can't expect to reap the ongoing benefits.  My weight loss is not just about looking good, it's about being healthy. Last night, Flopsy and I started playing tennis with our club's in-house competition.  This was one of my goals - to decide and commit to a plan about playing regular tennis.  So I'm feeling pretty pleased with myself about joining this competition because I really was very apprehensive about playing with other people.  To my surprise, I played pretty good (for me) and enjoyed it very much.  I also sweated a lot which reminds me that I'm doing my body good.  All in all a very satisfying experience - even though I've pulled up a little sore this morning. Other than that, life is great, it's nearly the weekend and I am very happy.  That's the main thing, right? <<Back     Home    Next>>