I’m glad that this week is over and now I can sit down and don’t feel obligated to do anything (besides cleaning the house). It’s funny and interesting how your mind plays with you, it can help you through difficult times or it can drag you down. During this past week I’ve experienced both. It all started on Monday. I woke up with a huge pain in my right knee and then after finishing my strength workout my head started pounding because of the effort needed to do my pushups. Even though I’m doing the alternative pushup, it was crazy difficult. I still don’t know how I managed to walk 10.000 steps that day, however, looking back I’m glad that I did.
Nothing special happened on Tuesday. I was just in a bad mood and didn’t want to do anything, zero willpower. To make things worse, the previous day, I’d forgotten to set up my polar to count the calories that I spent on my cardio workout. In the state of mind I was in, I could easily have blown that mistake out of proportion. I kept my cool and went for my walk and despite everything, I managed to do it in a very good time (1:32:25). At this point, I’m not that concerned about time, but I was pleased to see that I’m managing to intensify my routine.
I started off Wednesday with my strength training exercise and I did much better than the first day, although I still wound up with a mild headache because of the pushups. Man, this is a freaking hard exercise! I was in a good frame of mind and I even chose a path that was a little bit hilly. According to my polar watch, I burnt more calories than any previous day: 2.066. Of course you can never fully trust those gadgets, but it serves as a parameter and I can tell you that moving 368 pounds 10.000 times burns much more calories than moving 150 pounds for the same distance. Trust me it’s not an easy task.
Usually the first thing that I do when I wake up in the morning is go to the bathroom and then step on the scale. Thursday wasn’t any different, however, the results were more than a bit discouraging: I’d lost 0.1 pounds, geez thanks. Just to up the drama, my knees were a bit stiff. Needless to say there was a lot of emotion swirling around that day: “why am I doing this?”; “This is bullshit, I want to quit” and ___________ (you can add your favourite line here because by that point I was appropriating everything). Despite the vortex of emotion, I somehow decided that I should just keep doing what I should be doing and after putting my cardio off for as long as possible, I went out to the street. Even though I was having doubts about this whole weight loss thing and my knee was bugging me for the first little while (fortunately after warming up, the pain went away), I went for a strong walk and ended up beating my best time (1:30:32).
Friday was a special day, and warrants its own post which I’ll put up in a couple days. Just to give you a hint, it was the toughest day since I started this process.
As you can see, lots of mixed feelings were floating around in my head this week and I believe that more challenges are going to be thrown at me with more frequency that I’m expecting. This brings me back to something I’ve said before: to succeed on your diet you have to be mentally prepared above everything else, because just concentrating on food and exercise alone isn’t going to carry you through the difficulties on the road ahead.
