Shake Ya Ass — No Wait. Just Watch Yourself
There was a lot of the prologue dedicated to motivating factors and establishing my baseline. Honestly, that’s part of it.
Step one — start where you are.
I mentioned that my biggest motivator at the time was spite. It’s an external motivator. I wanted to prove people wrong.
Step two — give yourself a goal.
This part can feel scary; specific goals can feel very prone to failure and vague tend to feel inactionable. In either case, it can feel paralyzing before we’ve begun, but I’m going to talk about myself some more.
In my case, the externally motivated goal failed me from the start because people were going to think whatever they wanted to think, whether I was fat, fit, or somewhere in between. Moreover, since it wasn’t measurable in the slightest, I had no way to know when I was done.
In reverse order:
2 — Make a measurable goal. Measuring can be a pain, but it will be useful to get feedback, adjust, and celebrate your progress.
1 — External motivations work to a point, but somewhere along the way, you may find or try to set an internally motivated goal for yourself.
There are a lot of ways to establish goals, both internally and externally motivated. You might want:
- a hot beach bod by western beauty standards.
- to run a 5k for charity.
- to run a marathon to feel a sense of meaning and accomplishment.
- to fit into your favorite pair of pants again.
- to be able to play with your child/adjacent youngling without getting winded.
- to feel safe walking home at night alone.
- to feel more at home in your skin.
- to feel more in control of your body.
- to understand and curate your diet more efficiently.
- to build a new habit and/or hobby.
All of these are great goals, and they’re all capable of small improvements so we can measure them. It’s useful to consider the measurements we can use to keep track of our progress. These are all good metrics for our health and wellness, but some will be more relevant to certain goals.
We can measure:
- Weight
- Waist and Hips
- Body Composition
- Skin Elasticity
- Hours of Sleep
- Strength
- Speed
- Endurance
- Macros and/or Caloric Intake
- Frequency and duration of exercise
Whatever your goal, it’s important you have a measure to keep track of your progress. One of the bigger “regrets” I have from my process is that I didn’t measure myself at all really. I don’t have “progress pics” — these are probably the best I’ve got — and I didn’t keep track of my weight. I’m sure that contributed to some of the difficulties I faced, psychologically.
It feels obvious, but you have to know when you’ve failed. Failure tells us that our methods haven’t worked and that we need to adjust. There’s a tendency to associate failure with moral value, but you’re not a bad person for failing. You’re trying new things, learning new processes, and stressing your body in new ways. Failure is part of experimentation and growth, and it is a healthy component at that.
There’s another huge reason you need to keep track of your progress. What if you succeed?
That’s right. You might start this fitness journey, and you might succeed. So what then? You’ll measure yourself so that when you succeed you can first and foremost celebrate your victory. But also, so you can know when and how to push yourself beyond what has become your new limit. Step one — start where you are. But when you’ve gone and left yesteryou behind, you can start again where you are.
That’s the tipping point, and the secret. At some point, since you’ve measured yourself, and you’ve succeeded your goal changes. Your external motivation becomes internal, almost accidentally. You start waking up and feeling like eating healthier, exercising, or stretching because you’ve impressed yourself and you can do it again.
It doesn’t mean you’re going to succeed for the rest of time. You’ll fail along the way, as you go from goal to goal. But the success you make along the way will thrust you forward.
So you’ll measure yourself. However works best for you AND your goal.
Parting Thoughts
For some actionable “homework,” start measuring yourself in ways that mean anything to you. If you’ve given any thought to losing weight, start by keeping a food journal and log what you eat for the next week. Improve it the week after by trying to measure the calories and nutritional facts about the food you eat. From there, experiment by adjusting the knobs and playing around with your intake.
Actually, even if you’re not thinking about losing or gaining weight, I heavily recommend practicing goals and measurement with a food journal. We think about food a lot, and it’s vital to our survival.
Your diet is also a huge part of your health and wellbeing.
If you haven’t, give a read to my prologue. I lost almost 100 pounds. Exercise helped, but the changes in my diet — cutting out soda, cutting back on alcohol, eating less in general — were what really crashed my weight.
Be safe and be well.
