Life will never be the same!

Yeah, I'll start with this one:

I was in college when I first heard this, and I like it. I was thinking of writing about something that will lift people up and motivate me to continue. Which will inevitably end on a sour note, into something existential, as usual. I was thinking about how did I start to do something that was postponed for so long, how did I avoid some half-ass effort, and how did stuff start to work.

The story is about my weight, but maybe can be applied to everything else in my life, now that I learn how to do it right. My story started a long time ago. For a considerable period of time, from age of 13 until the age of 27, my weight was constant, 62 kg. But then something happened, and the kilograms start to pile up, 2-3 extra to creep in every year, I presume it is just the aging process, yet, this makes me worried at times. I ended up going above 90-91 kg last summer. And this limit kind of started to ring a bell in my mind. So, I did a reality check, to see what I did wrong. Well, quite a bit, as it turns out. I was careless. I was eating fast food, 3 to 5 times a week. I was drinking fizzy drinks, quite a lot of them, enjoying the full-sugar Coca-Cola and energy drinks mostly. I was eating a lot of sweets. What can I say, I was all over. Add a hectic sleeping pattern to this, a sedentary life, and there you are, the poster child of the future old age diseases.

It started once more with a book, that lead to another book, that eventually leads to me taking action. I was reading 'How to be fxxking awesome' by Dan Meredith, and at some moment he mentioned a book called 'The 12 week year' by Moran and Lemmington. And this book is taking one of my favorite questions, it may be Steve Jobs that said it first, but I am not sure, when they take another classic, the 10-year plan, he said: now think about it, what can you do to make it happen in just one year? And even if you fail, you may achieve everything in 2-3 years instead, this is one of those times when even when you lose, you are winning. As you do not take the whole 10 years in doing it. So, back to this book, they did some kind of research, and they find that when you have a schedule for a whole year, quite often you do 80% of the work in the last 12 weeks of the year, as you approach the deadline. So, the idea was: what if instead of doing it at the end of the year, you do all the 80% in the first 12 weeks of the year? And then do it again, and again, 4 times in a year? 80% x 4 is equal to 320%. More than three times increase in productivity. Of course, you may not want to do all this for a corporation, or for a place where you are employed, as more than once, being fast and good at what you do will just bring you more work, but what about working for yourself. Or working with yourself. On yourself? And being 3 times better at it.

Getting rid of the extra weight seems a hard thing to do, as you need to fight literally decades of bad habits, and social pressure (quite impossible to get a non-caffeine, not fizzy, low-sugar drink in the pub, thank God for beer) and few more other annoying things. Yeah, I know, alcohol is bad for weight too, but I only go to the pub to drink maybe twice a year, so, I'm cool with it. So, I came up with a plan. Until now, I did a few tries, tackling issues individually, but this time I went all in, taking everything into account.

• No caffeine at all, no drink with caffeine (and this gave me like 2 weeks of headache until my body got used again to survive without it). I got clarity, I got the real focus back, and no more grogginess and slow reactions after the initial power-up and fast kick related to caffeine, these were the boosts. The only problem, I was Superman no more, I was getting tired by 21:00-22:00, and staying awake at night actually started to be difficult.

• No more fizzy, sugary drinks, which turn out to be 99% of them. I was only left with water and tea, both normal and herbal. Tested a few nice herbal teas. Still find drinking normal water hard, but I can do it, a few times a day. Sometimes I am just using some vitamin C with it, just to make it better.

• Sleeping at least 7-8 hours every night, early when possible. Actually, I am doing this most weeks, at least 5 times or more. I am as surprised as you can be.

• Taking some natural supplements to help me to boost my metabolism and burn some more fat. This is a hit-and-miss, as most of them are made from plants tasting bitter, for some reason. So, I try to take them regularly, but sometimes I tend to 'forgot'. Huh!

• Training 3-4 times a week, at a medium intensity or higher. Again, most of the weeks, this worked fine, until my shoulder and my elbow started to act up, and now I am doing it a bit slower to let them recover.

• Saving energy. This is a tricky one, trying to identify and avoid some bad habits that let you lose energy without any solid results. This is some fine-tuned activity, highly specialized. But I am doing my part here too, even if sometimes I tend to ignore it.

And there we are, going well, all the way. losing around 1 kilo per week, all the way to 82 kg. For eight weeks, everything worked out quite well. And then it happened. Due to some internal and external circumstances, on a very busy week, I missed all the training at the gym. And I ate a bit too much (yeah, I am talking about the New Year and that week around it). And instead of going down, I went up, from 82 to 83 kg. But stuff like this can happen. It is one week that went wrong, and 8 weeks that went right. If your 10-year plan is done in 3 years instead of the desired 1 year, it is still a clear win, right? If my objective is missed by 1 kg, do I still win? Of course. And right now, I regroup, and I start even stronger. Few more weeks left. I'll do it.

See you tomorrow,
George

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