After 3 article posts, I thought I'll do something a little light hearted today.
I recently weighed myself and am very pleased to annouce that I have lost 4KG since I started and continued with an exercise plan dated back to 1st October 2012.
Before I continue I would like to share with you all a verse that can help you motivate yourself to start getting fit and in shape. It is a verse from Dr Bernard's sermon about aggressive faith
Heb 11:32-38
32 And what more shall I say? For the time would fail me to tell of Gideon and Barak and Samson and Jephthah, also of David and Samuel and the prophets: 33 who through faith subdued kingdoms, worked righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, 34 quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, out of weakness were made strong, became valiant in battle, turned to flight the armies of the aliens
As Dr Bernard shared, notice all the verbs used are rather strong verbs, and because I'm named after Daniel, I particularly like the part which says 'stopped the mouth of lions'
After having put on so much weight the past year, which reduced my confidence to an all-time low, I decided to shout to myself 'STOP!' 'ENOUGH IS ENOUGH' 'STOP the empty promises, it's time to put words into action. It's time to start exercising to my ideal weight! It's time to get my body into the shape that can better serve God and influence people!
All this while my exercises have lasted for a maximum of 2 weeks. After that I start to lose focus and the moment I start to procrasinate and say 'it's ok, I'll make it up by running more tomorrow' is the moment when my failure starts to kick in. 1 day become 2 days which became 1 week and before I knew it, I was back to square 1. It's time to STOP this procrasination. It's time to get down to business!
It was quite a difficult process as initially, I couldn't see any results for the first few weeks and it got me a little demoralized. But at that point I had 2 choices, either give up and accept the facts, or just perserve anyway believing that one day the results will show! Thank God that I chose the latter. I ran and ran and ran.
On a side note, I would like to personally thank the programmers of runkeeper for creating such an awesome application.
For the first week of Oct, I ran 5 times, starting from 3km and slowly increasing it to 4 to start getting my fitness levels up. This is the stage where mentality is key. Dr Robi once said that this is the stage where you are driven by what you don't what, which is a bulging tummy. This is the stage where you start to plan your goals.
For the second week, I slowed down the intensity to 4 times. However, I ran mostly more than 4km with the highest being 6.86km.
For the third week, this is the period where like how Dr Robi mentions, your negetive motivation from what you don't want decreases. Now is when you need to get your motivation from what you want, or positive motivation. My positive motivations were to be 65kg and shinning for Jesus! This was one of my best weeks as I never crossed the 3 week mark before. I ran a total of 4 times with a distance of 5-6km each time.
For the 4th week, this was when I needed to maintain consistency. I knew that the moment I stopped, my momentum would stop as well. I continued where I left off and ran 4 times alternating between 5-6km. The reason why I didn't increase the distance was because I knew that it would put pressure on the next time I ran. I wanted to do it slowly but consistently rather than big jumps in distances and later lose motivation due to the pressure of needing to keep up.
At this point, somehow, my weight was still the same! This was when encouragement from friends played a crucial role. I complained about it on facebook and the friends who commented really gave some useful tips and explainations. This is why someimtes you can only go so far as an individual, but if you have friends and family, or work as a team, you can accomplish much more. This is why we must constantly encourage one other!
Spurred on again with extra motivation, I decided to try running less times but covering bigger distances as it was told to me that fats start burning effectively only after 30 mins of running. For the next week, I went for the juggular and did 2 sessions of 10km respectively! it was a milestone achievement as I never ran 10km before! If it wasn't for my friends who encouraged me, this would not have been possible!
Finally, after the 4th week, I noticed a difference! I had lost 2kg . I think the reason why it was so little was because I wasn't watching my diet. My diet stayed the same as I didn't believing in dieting and I loved food too much! But again, under the guidance of Yuxin, I was motivated to do slight changes to my diet. She questioned my motivation and told me that if I really wanted to be effective, diet is important.This got me stirred up again and one of the steps I took was to half my carbo intake.
Part 2 to come soon! Stay motivated! Stay encouraged! Remenmber there are no 'if's' in this world, there is only ' JUST DO IT'
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