Choose to Lose Fitness Challenge

It’s officially over! I have heard several positive success stories, and it seems that everyone enjoyed the weekly physical challenges.

Speaking of challenges …. Whether you want to continue down the path of weight loss or whether you are now at a point where you want to maintain your recent weight loss, you need to keep challenging yourself in the area of quality food intake and quality exercise. The Choose to Lose Fitness Challenge was just the first step to incorporating lifestyle changes. It was a ladder to be used to get you out of the “pit of despair” of holiday food binging to level ground. Now you are faced with the choice of sliding back into the pit or continuing down a level path. The choice is a DAILY choice; it’s YOUR choice to make. The choice will never go away, but it does get easier.

Amongst all the articles I’ve read, there was one that basically someone just gave there predictions for 2010 (stumptuous.com). The predictions varied, and the writer gave his/her predictions on subjects such as healthcare, medical research, stress, farming industry …. Just a lot of stuff. Anyways, the first prediction related to why New Years’ Resolutions will fail this year …..

You will fail at your New Year’s Resolutions this year — and every year — unless you figure out the real problem and focus on the process, not the product.
Why are you out of shape? Why are you poorly nourished?
It’s not “willpower” — it’s the current structures and systems of your life.
Your relationship with your body mirrors your relationship with the other domains of your existence. Your body reflects your current values and priorities as well as your environment — social and physical.
• Fix your surroundings and relationships.
• Bump fitness and nutrition up the list of values and priorities.
• Find the limiting factors that are holding you back, and remove them.
• Examine the structure of your physical environment and daily routines to find the elements that sabotage you (or help you).
• Get away from soul-sucking people, things, and situations. Go towards people, things, and situations that bring you joy and give you energy.
• Question your underlying assumptions about how this whole project works and why it matters.
Not saying you have to solve it all, but if you don’t address the root cause of whatever’s bothering you, you’re doomed to fail.
Another fitness writer talked about a woman he knew who planned lavish, indulgent, junk-food meals while she was “on a diet”. In other words, this is a temporary fix, and then things will be magically different and I can engage in poor choices with impunity. Nuh-uh. It doesn’t work like that.
Be brave.
Get some big garbage bags — real or metaphysical — and start throwing shit out, whether that’s energy vampire people who don’t support you, crap “food” that poisons you, or assumptions and mindsets that are fundamentally self destructive.
Question everything until you peel away all those onion layers to find out why you are in the situation you are in.

As you can see, the writer doesn’t hold anything back and this weight loss and weight maintenance stuff is not all about food and exercise. There are other components to address. What a perfect time for some Spring cleaning (of our minds)!

Keep the faith!