I’m turning 39 this year and it’s scaring the living daylights out of me. Working an office job has killed my body in ways that is truly embarrassing and now I’ve decided to take back control. But exercising and dieting has never been for me. So how do you lose weight when you can’t sweat or have a 9-5 job?
Gamify your life. At least that works for me. I’m competitive in strange ways and if I can create goals that work like a video game with metrics that I can measure success, then I’m on board. There is no lose mechanism (except weight!) so I am not going to make myself disappointed with the results if I feel better in the end.
Goals: Lose 10 lbs. Then 20 lbs. Then 30 lbs. Go until I am at the weight I want to be at.
Rules: I have to count calories (for now it’s just calories but not sugar yet), but still eat responsibly and healthy. I have to weigh myself every day at roughly the same time each day, which means first thing in the morning. I have to track my habits which will serve as metrics for general well-being. There’s no timetable for losing weight. I’m not going to change the number of calories I eat, and I want to stay at 2000 calories per day which I think is good if I do light to medium workouts.
I started this on January 1. I weighed myself mid-day and found that I weighed a eye-opening 180 lbs. It hurts so bad knowing that I’ve let myself go this much. I decided that starting then that I’d do some pushups and get to 60-80 a day and other types of exercises. See if I can work my way to 100 comfortably.
Then the tracking began. Folks suggested that I download apps on my phone but truthfully, I’m rarely on my phone. I hate being on my phone except to play music and know that I’m never checking my phone at work or at home so this idea went out the window almost immediately. I instead opted to create a spreadsheet on Google Sheets to keep open while at the office and home where I track each item I eat and the number of calories I took in. If I bought it then I also included the dollar amount which will serve me for future uses.
This is the findings from last week. I added more data that I thought would be helpful, like tracking my weekly caloric intake and talking about my journey thus far. I want to celebrate the victories, no matter how small and still give myself room to improve. This week I also added some special fields that will automatically flag caloric intake of over 300 calories in a single item. I’m not necessarily trying to avoid those items but want to be able to glance at the ‘big ticket items’.
In my bullet journal I started tracking my habits as part of my self-improvement for 2020. I wanted to track things that I found meaningful and is a way to track the victories, or places I can work on. Those categories are intentionally limited to art/design, water intake, exercising, mood. The latter portion of my year was pretty dour and I want to be mindful of my mood during the start of the new year. The metrics are pretty self-explanatory for categories like water intake (1 = 1 cup of water), and exercising means I did 20 of some form of exercise. As I do more, this metric really comes down how active did I feel for the day. Did I knock out 100 push ups? What about other types of exercises? Some categories are without a set metric for art and design is if I felt creative, did I draw, or design something in my iPad? Mood I think is pretty self-explanatory.
Lastly, and the biggest shame, is my weight. I need to own it for this year. I have the starting weight and now I need to track it every day roughly at the same time and be held accountable to it. I can’t be afraid to look at it anymore and so I created another page to track my weight. For both the habit tracker and weight tracker, I added graphs because my visual mind likes to see the pretty pictures associated with my hard work. I’m not going to beat myself up each day if I gain weight. I know I’m working on myself in a good way.
You’ll notice there small triangles in the top right of some fields. I found that you can add notes without having to create extra fields which can clutter the space. If you hover the mouse over each item, you’ll see notes I added, which depends on the page you’re on. For the weight tracker, I included the exercises I did for that day. For the meal tracker, it is a daily review of things I found worked, things that didn’t and want I want to do in the future. This is different from the weekly review where I want to think back about how I did for that week and celebrate the victories and make new plans for the next week. The day to day reviews celebrates the journey.
So here’s to 2020, goals without the guilt!
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