I know that sleep is very necessary to being awake during the day. I also have heard that it is needed to properly lose weight and build muscle. Without sleep you body is just to tired and worn out to be strong and slim. I wish I would have listened to myself earlier. For the past week I have been forcing myself to go to sleep my 12:00 midnight. Midnight is the latest I could be awake until. I also forced myself to wake up at 7:00. I was making sure to get a minimum of 7 hours of sleep a night. What a difference it made.

You can see my current sleep habits from above, so let me give you a back ground in my old sleep habits. I would usually go to bed only when I was completely exhausted. I would stay up watching TV or Surfing the interned until about 2:00 of 3:00 in the morning. Then I would crash. I would get up in the morning after about 5 or 6 snooze alarms and go straight to work at about 8:30. This was my routine. Let me tell you, it was not working out. I was tired all day, I would eat a huge breakfast to try and get energy. I would get a Large Coffee from starbucks and just be a zombie all day. The coffee would stave off my hunger, but when it wore off I would gorge on fast food for lunch. I would be in a food coma for the rest of the day. I would hardly eat dinner due to the large lunch. Then came gym time. I say time because the time came and went. I was up for hours, and then I repeated the routine. I think I figured out where the weight came from.

 I decided to reevaluate my sleep patterns when I decided to lose the weight. I had always heard fitness folks talking about waking up at 5:00 in the morning and going running. They are trim and fit, so it might be worth it. I picked 7:00 because 5:00 is just too early. 7:00 also gives me enough time to get a 30 minute walk in every morning before work. I picked midnight to go to sleep just because I want 7 hours of sleep. It is basically arbitrary. I knew it would take time to adjust so I was prepared for that. I had previously trained myself to wake up early, so this was really just remembering that. It took me one week to get used to the routine.

Today is the first day that waking going to bed and waking up was like clockwork. I was out like a light at 11:45 and up at 7:00 sharp and walked for 30 minutes. I had watermelon for breakfast with a medium coffee. I had vegetable soup for lunch and a bean burrito (home made) for dinner. I then walked for another hour or so. I was not hungry all day, I only ate what I needed and I had the energy to walk over 4 miles. It is awesome!

Thought the week I could feel myself building in energy. It started out sluggish but better that before. Each day got a little better. I’m sure that my better eating habits and exercise contributed enormously to this feeling, but I firmly believe it would not last without proper sleep. Being well rested lifted my motivation by leaps and bounds. If I feel this much better while still being overweight, I can’t wait until I lose more.

Get more sleep… it is great!

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I have been eating mare fruits and veggies and less fast food. I have been losing weight. I also have been hitting the gym pretty hard. I have been going 4 times a week and lifting heavy. It has taken its toll on me. If you are hitting the gym and dieting you are stressing your body and you need to watch yourself for injury.

This week I injured my back and shoulder lifting weights. I am pretty careful to lift safely, but since I am using allot of energy to lose weight, I didn’t realize the stress it puts on my body.

Your body takes time to adjust to a new diet. When your body is adjusting it causes stress on your body. Energy that normally would be used to move is now going elsewhere. Starting a new exercise routine causes similar stresses. You body needs time to adjust to the new levels of work out. Combining a new diet and new exercise doubles (may be more) the stresses on your body. When your body has that much extra stress you are open to injury. You don’t want to hurt yourself and end up not being able to work out for a week or two.

My recommendation is to keep it simple for the first few weeks of a new diet and workout routine. Take your time and ease into your workout routine. At first, don’t push yourself too hard. I would say do 60% of what you could do and work up from there. Take 3 of 4 weeks to work up to the level of exertion you desire. When you are adjusted, and then step up the intensity. You’ll know when you are adjusted when you can workout much longer without becoming exhausted.

Don’t end up like me and hurt yourself. You don’t want to be out of the gym or off the treadmill for a week. You especially don’t wan to lose momentum when you are first starting out a new routine. So take it easy and ease into your new diet and workout. Your body will thank you.

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Blogging is a great way to keep yourself motivated. I recently discovered blogging. Actually i didnt recently discover it, i did work as a web designer for over a year, but i did just recently start blogging. I can see why it is gaining so much popularity now. I find that writing about you experiences keeps them in you mind. When you consiously think about your life you retain more and learn more about yourself. Writing is a great way to make you life much more conscience.

When i desided i wanted to lose weight, about 6 months ago, i had trouble sticking to it. I would go tho the gym for a week, then forget about it for a while. I would remember the gym again and then forget. The same would go with my diet. I would buy healthy food but and i would eat it. When the food ran out, instead of buying more, i would just get some fast food. I would repeat this over and over. I couldnt keep the thoughts of working out and eating well in my head long enought to get it to stick. Then i discovered blogging.

My first attempt at blogging was to take photos of myself every day and post them on the web. I did this so i could see my progress. It didnt really work. I just forgot about doing that too. However, there was one photo i posted and along with that photo i put a little blurb about what i was doing and feeling that day. I noticed that i didnt forget about that post. Every time that i did something that was similar to what i wrote, i remembered that post. “Hmm, an interesting phenomenon I thought” I tried it again, and the same thing happened. And it kept happeneing, and thats why this blog is here.

Everything i learn about weight loss and healthy living i write down here. I find that it sticks in my mind. If i write my experiences, then I can consiously hold them longer and reflect on them. It is a tremundous tool in weight loss. I dont forget about excercising or forget to eat healthy. It gave me a huge boost in confidence. I wake up everyday and i know what i have to do to get slim and fit. I dont have to try and remember why i am motivated, its right in my blog.

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Eating healthy and excercise is always touted as the secret to weight loss. I hear it day in and day out… and i firmly believe it.  I dont thing that healthy diet and excercise are the only things you need. Your mental state, hapiness, work, friends, social life, living conditions etc. all contribute to your health and weight. I think I have figured out one of those things, eating healthy. And the secret I found to eating healthy is… my lazyness.

I am a very intospective person. I like to analyse my life to figure our why I do the things I do. I believe that if I fing out the root of my behaviors, i can then work on changing. This has worked immensely for me. It worked in finging out why i ead unhealthily. The root of my unhealthy eating habits were convience. Eating unhealthy was just too easy for me.

It was more convienient for me to eat at McDonalds then to cook a steak. It was more convienient for me to make a microwave pizza than to make a salad. If i wanted a snack, i just reached into the cupboard and grabbed a handful of doritos. It was just so easy. Upon this realization that eating unhealthy was so easy, i also realized why eating healthy was so hard. I didnt have any healthy food!

If I wanted a meal and had no food at home, i would have to go out. I had two alternatives; fast food or go to the store, buyu some meat and veggies, cook the meat and veggies and then eat. I was hungry and just driving through was much easier. So, i figured this if I went shopping and bought all healthy foods and kept my kitchen constantly stocked with healthy foods, I would eat healthy. I was right!

Since i had food at home, it was easier to just make something than to get in my car and drive to some fast food joint. Since making food at home was now easier, and all i had was healthy food, I ate healthy food! Wow! It hasn’t been difficult either. The one thing i have to watch is, the amount of food i have in stock. If I run out of food at home I instantly get the urge to eat out. I just have to make sure that my fridge id stocked healthily at all times.

I guess you could call this ‘working smarter, not harder’. Trying to use your will power to avoid bad foods is just too much work for some people… like me. I found that if I only gave myself healthy options, I would take them. Try if for yourself an let me know how it does.

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Setting goals in your weight loss quest is a great way to achieve weight loss. Setting goals is also a great way to destroy your plans. How can I just say that? I sad goals are good and then turn around and say goals are bad. Effectively setting goals will greatly increase your successes. Ineffectively setting goals will cause failure. How do you effectively set goals? What are ineffective goals? 
Effective goals for losing weight are much different that traditional goals. Traditional goals may require planning and hard work. Weight loss goals require only persistence. In fact, when losing weight you only have two goals. Actually you need two types of goals. The first goal is you long term target weight or fitness level. The second goal is your weekly routine.

Long term target: Your long term target weight goal is the weight or fitness level you want to achieve for the future. This is the easiest goal to set. All you do is set a number you want to achieve in the future. If you want to lose weight, you goal is to be 30 pounds lighter. If your goal is to become more physically fit, your goal is to be able to run an 8 minute mile. Your goal here must be simple and attainable. If you set impossible goals, you are missing the point. Notice, you have not set a time frame. This is on purpose. Your long term target goal is only a point you want to reach. It takes the amount of time it takes. My long term target is: “I want to weigh 180 pounds”. I weighed 230 when I set this goal. Notice it is simple: be 180 pounds and attainable; 50 pounds is a weight that is able to be lost and is healthy to do so. Also, there is no time frame.   
Weekly Routine: This is the goal that takes the work. Actually the point of this goal is to make something that is hard into something mindless. Your weekly routine is the things you do in a week that will cause you to lose weight or get fit. If you wish to lose weight, you weekly routine will include exercise and eating good. If you want to get fit your weekly routine will include the same. To make this clear, I will describe my weekly goal. I wake up at 7:00 every day. After I wake, I go for a fast walk for at least 30 minutes. I come home, shower and eat a healthy breakfast. My breakfast is usually fruit, water or juice, and some toast. After breakfast I shower and go to work.  I make my own lunch. If I want a snack at work, it is fruit or vegetables. When I get off work, I go home and either walk another 30 minutes or lift weights. I then eat a healthy dinner. I go to sleep, no later than 12:00. That is a day. I do this every day. My goal is to do this for one week. I achieve my goal if I do this every day for a week. At the beginning of the week, I set the exact same goal. At first you daily routine will be difficult, and you may fail at your goal of doing it for the week. That’s fine… you have next week to achieve it. Eventually you will succeed at achieving you weekly goal. You just keep setting the goal and achieving it. The point of this is to get to the point that setting and achieving this weekly goal becomes routine, hence “weekly routine”. You want it to become mindless. You just want to be able to set this goal and achieve it week after week.

The two goal system is the only effective way to set and achieve weight loss or fitness goals. Here is an example of an ineffective goal. “I want to loose 2 pounds a week for 20 weeks for a total weight loss of 40 pounds” This sounds like a reasonable goal. But what happens if you miss a 2 pound mark? You have to loose 4 pounds the next week. If you miss that then you need to lose 6 pounds. Eventually you will need to lose an unreasonable amount of weight in that week. You will have failed. The problem was that you are stuck in a time frame and you have no routine. The same goal using the two goal system goes like this. “I want to be 40 pounds lighter. I will work out everyday for a week and not eat fast food” If you miss your weekly goal, by say missing a work out or eating McDonalds, you don’t need to work out twice as much or eat twice as less McDonalds. That doesn’t even make sense. If you mess up one week, you have next week to achieve the goal. Really, you goal is to make setting and achieving you weekly goal so routine that it is just that… routine. Think of it as practice. You practice setting and achieving you weekly goal until you are really good at it. 

Once achieving your weekly goal becomes routine you will notice yourself getting closer and closer to achieving you long term target. Eventually you will reach your target weight or fitness level. The beauty here is that you won’t have to stick to any diet or workout to maintain what you have succeeded. The actions you preformed to achieve your long term goal is already routine to you. It would be much harder to break your routine than to just continue doing it!

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