Fitness and personal effectiveness

This year, a series of factors converged to send me back to the gym.
These included:
I think the final motivator was that I realised that it was only going to become harder to get fit, the longer I left it. My desire to take the shortest path between two points kicked in at this point and the compelling event occurred.

So, I did what most people do when faced with what seems like a large challenge: break it down into manageable smaller steps and get cracking.

First, sign up to the gym again. Easy - the gym was a block away from my home. An interesting view on getting going was reading Steve Pavlina's blog on the 30-day trial. It literally was after reading this I decided I could join the gym for a month, and not feel like I was making a monumental commitment.

Second, make going part of your lifestyle. Not so easy...
So I had some barriers here, all of them mental and a matter of self-discipline:
So, I got a personal trainer.

Frankly, the selection process was reasonably simplistic and reasonably tragic.
My partner had seen this trainer at the gym and he is a pretty good looking guy, in fact, he's also a model. So I was reasonably assured that he was doing something right (i.e. he had credibility) and I was going to strive not to feel like a loser when training with him (i.e. I was able to compete at a basic level). The only other criteria I was going to apply: was I going to get along with him and was he going to be able to push me, without annoying me (i.e. was I going to respect him) . I'm acutely aware that if I don't respect someone, I'm not going to factor in what they have to say to my decision making process.

As it turns out, Andreas is a pretty good trainer for me. He's managed to take my moaning and groaning but push me more than I though he could. Interestingly, his technical style suits my "by the numbers" approach nicely. For instance, he recommended taking a DEXA scan in order to measure fat/muscle. This is pretty absolute in terms of measurement, unlike other methods of measurement. Horribly but predictably, I clocked in with 30%+ body fat. I my mind, I now had measurable goals to work towards.

The last stage of this process was going to be my diet.

I'd fallen into the usual habits of the workplace: irregular eating habits driven by slavery to meeting schedules combined with poor food choices (i.e. tasty rather than healthy). Combined with my regular travel and work breakfasts, lunches and dinners - it wasn't a pretty picture.

With Andreas' guidance, it has been an interesting journey to say the least. We had always focused on checking out the fat contents of food in the supermarket. What we weren't looking at
was the energy (calories) contained in that food. So something with reasonably low fat content (i.e. less than 10%), could in fact be a quarter to a half of your daily required intake through things like sugars and carbohydrates. Bummer.

So, at the time of writing this, I've been 'on mission' for four and a half months and been reasonably happy with my progress. I get to measure that progress absolutely in two weeks with my second DEXA scan, but having dropped two waist sizes and having a tonne more energy, I feel my personal effectiveness has dramatically improved.

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posted by Lee Gale @ 1:00 AM,

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