Hopefully you have developed a progressive way of dealing with your current situation by honestly asking yourself how you arrived where you are. You can also begin to tell that adding weight or being fat is not a physical problem but an emotional one. You are not fat because you can’t be slim but because you will not be slim. You are not losing weight not because you can’t but because you will not – you haven’t decided to.
I saw an athlete, a professional swimmer who added over 80kg. This is someone who is not afraid to work out, who knows discipline, she was a pro so when I read she used to be a professional swimmer, I wondered. She didn’t add weight because she forgot how to swim; she added weight because she had unresolved mind issues. If you look at the lives of people who have lost weight and kept it off, you can tell that there was once a time when they could barely move from place to place without losing their breath, now they go on 5km runs and still go about their lives like nothing happened. You must wonder how they made the transformation, what changed? If it is the same person, with the same body, it means the only thing that changed was how they thought, how they now decided to see themselves. In 2013, I could not do more than ten skips. I mean even the ten was a struggle. I would bend over and hold my knee, struggling to catch my breath. I could not sustain myself in a plank position to even plank. I cried! How will I ever be able to lose weight when I can’t even do basic exercise? I already felt like a failure for letting myself get so fat, I did not want to feel like a super failure for not being able to lose weight. I would start a pity party on how I would be fat forever (thinking about it now, I must have looked pathetic). But I was just too tired of where I was and knew that I just had to do something, so I searched for inspiration. I looked for Jennifer Hudson’s before and after photo, Monique’s before and after photos and I would tell myself that these women don’t have two heads. Every day I would challenge myself and before I knew it, I was doing 100 skips, 200 skips, 500 skips and today I do 4,000 skips. I would do three seconds plank, to five, then ten, now I do two minutes. What changed? My thinking. Until you are tired of where you are, where you want to be will continue to seem like an impossibility. You have to want it bad enough. Nobody can want it for you enough to get you to lose weight.
I have to tell you how I get so excited when someone calls, emails or sits me down and says, “Please tell me how you did it! I’m ready to do ANYTHING.” I have gotten emails that made me cry. Because I know how much this experience has changed my life, I am always eager to share. You need to see the transformation in attitude when they get my reply. Their responses usually go like this, “Ah! I can’t stop eating rice oh, I can’t stop eating swallow, I can’t stop eating chocolates! Exercise? Can’t I just do an easy diet?” I wish I could show you a picture with my expression. People expect me to have one pill they can swallow, then go to bed and wake up 40kg slimmer. Well, there isn’t! Just like you didn’t go to bed and wake up fat, it took time; losing weight will also take time. Stop looking for the quickest fix. If you started working on yourself the moment you realised you were overweight you would have lost considerable weight by now already, but you were too busy complaining it demanded too much. Not to worry, I am also guilty. In fact, it is because of the guilt that I don’t get mad at the responses I get from people, because it reminds me of the same things I used to say. I really believed I could lose weight as easily as I gained it, by eating what I wanted. Romantic right? Somehow I was so special that the law of seed time and harvest didn’t apply to me, that I could still eat all I wanted and lose weight, it didn’t take long for me to realise it was better to accept the truth and get to it than dance around playing yoyo with my life.
Most of us want the end result but we want to overlook the process to get to the destination. The time has really come for you to stop making excuses. Time to stop saying you can’t afford the gym or a personal trainer or the expensive diets. I can tell you I needed none of those. I did all my exercises at home, by myself, with no trainer and my diet was affordable. Doing research saved me a lot of money.
HOME WORK
Ask yourself
1. How badly do I want it?
2. What am I willing to give up to get it?
My darling, if you know you are not ready to give up your old life for the new life then you are not ready. No one gets new results from old behavior.
Fitmua 