Hey Everyone,
Welcome back to the Sunday Blog. I have to say, it actually feels a bit weird sitting here typing on Sunday afternoon…I haven’t actually done it for a couple of weeks. Whilst there have been 3x blog posts in the last two-weeks, none of them have been on Sunday (for whatever reason) and – I am hoping that I can get back into a more consistent RHYTHM moving forward.
Tomorrow marks the first day of our new time-table – check all of the details HERE. The new ‘Hammer Time’ class, the additional sessions for the strength side of the gym, the extra morning sessions…there is a lot going on. ‘Hammer Time’ is probably the LEAST structured class we have ever tried to run so please give us a bit of a chance over the next couple of weeks whilst we get all of the nuances ‘nailed’…it is going to be awesome though. For everyone out there asking me if they can do ‘TRIAL’ classes on the ‘STRENGTH’ side of the gym, well, no – you can’t. But what you CAN DO is upgrade your membership for a couple of weeks and try out as many as you like…then you can either ‘LEAVE IT’ at the upgraded level (cost difference is $15/fortnight – $53.50 compared to $38.50) or downgrade it again…
What else? Well, it is now 2-weeks post ’28-days-Later’ challenge, and I wanted to ask everyone a question: “How’s it going? Are you CLOSER or FURTHER AWAY from the goals you set at the start of the challenge NOW than you were at the end of the challenge?” In other words, have you kept it going or have you thrown it all away….to be truthful, I probably should be asking this question to everyone who rolled up to the gym at the beginning of the year with an idea in their head (a ‘resolution?’) that ‘2019 is gonna be different – it is gonna be MY year’. Now, I can’t tell you how to make it so (exactly), but I can tell you the things I think you are probably doing wrong.
Thing Number #1: You have a plan, but…
I hate the saying ‘I wish I had a $1 for every time….’ ‘cos I figure it is like seeing a service station with cheap fuel and a L-O-N-G line of cars waiting. You might save a little bit, but the petrol tank in my car is only 60-litres, so even if it is ‘10c cheaper’ (…and I mean, WOW) you still only save $6. You would 100% be better off cutting down on the takeaway coffees and buying petrol somewhere than you don’t have to wait in line for 15 minutes. I mean, if you only get a $1 every time something happens, it would need to happen like, 10000 times for it to be something that might get you interested…that said, I WISH I had a dollar for every time someone said to me ‘I eat pretty healthy really…’.
What this tends to mean is ‘I eat pretty healthy for 2-meals each day…not counting snacks’. If you actually want to lose weight/get somewhere then what I call the ‘2-ex-snacks’ plan is not going to cut it. You need to actually eat yourself a balanced brekky, lunch and dinner. And for you girls out there who are training hard at the gym but battling to get in enough calories to support your training, it probably needs to be a balanced brekky, lunch#1, lunch#2, dinner because you probably battle to get more than 350 calories into a single meal and you are going to be WAY down on your daily requirements and you are going to keep cannibalising muscle. And feeling tired.
So you need to take a bit of time to sort this out. THREE meals per day. And lose the snacks – they are not helping.
Thing Number #2: You don’t prepare properly.
The most annoying cliché ever is ‘If you fail to prepare then you are preparing to fail’ – and it always seems to be thrown out there at the WORST possible time (like, when you realise things are falling apart and you don’t really have a plan!) and it is also a great ‘Lord of the After-thought’ saying (you know, something that might have been helpful yesterday but now is just annoying). But it is true.
If you pre-prepare your breakfasts, you are NEVER too rushed in the morning to cook them.
If you pre-prepare your lunch, you NEVER find yourself at the café at 2pm staring at the dregs in the bain-marie.
If you have a MENU for dinner that you took with you when you did the shopping (and stuck to the fridge), you wont ever find yourself swinging on the door of the fridge looking for ‘something’ to cook before grabbing for the take-away pizza menu.
If you want to get on the upward path, you have to put a bit of work in. Even if that ‘Menu’ on the fridge says ‘Monday, Fish+Salad – Tuesday, Chicken+Salad – Wednesday, Steak+Salad…etc’, that at least constitutes a plan that you can easily follow. It is the lunch thing that I find makes the most difference though – relying on left-overs is great…until there aren’t any, and then DISASTER. And once there is one disaster, you are giving yourself (sub-consciously or otherwise) permission to head back to the café with the dodgey bain marie and the delicious chips and gravy (did you know there is a place that does “mac and cheese loaded fries”? Sounds amazing!). You have to walk the straight and narrow path with PLANNED diversions if you want to make a success of this.
Thing Number #3: You have made adjustments…but from WHAT?
So – this ties in pretty tightly to the ‘I eat pretty healthy really’ comment I referenced earlier. EVERYONE thinks they are doing a ‘pretty good’ job with their food (and most people actually are) BUT this approach compromises progress because it stops them having a REALLY, REALLY GOOD LOOK at what you are putting in your mouth.
I am going to go to another cliché now. “What get’s measured, gets MANAGED”. If you record the what and why of your food – and make sure that you set your protein to (about) 0.8kg/kg of bodyweight AND your total calories to around the 20/kg bodyweight mark…then do that again every day – well, that’s going to put you on the right track. Now I am sorry for everyone out there who is going to say to me that they don’t have time to record their food or they don’t want to or whatever else – and I get that, because I feel exactly the same way.
BUT. I am here to tell you that what gets MEASURED gets MANAGED, and that the 5-mins you spend after each meal recording the ‘what’ and ‘how much’ is time well spent – and it is particularly time well spent if you are trying to lose a kg or 2 and spending a few hours each week ‘killing yourself’ in the gym to try and do that!
Thing Number #4: You are a cheating, McCheater.
If you have ‘just a bite’ it counts. If you have just a ‘little piece’ it counts. If you just at the ‘little bit’ that was left on child number 3’s plate, well that counts as well. And the 3x glasses of wine you had after dinner last Tuesday but ‘FORGOT’ to write down…you know something, that counts as well. EVERYTHING COUNTS.
By the time you add up all of the ‘little’ extras that everyone tells you “DON’T MATTER”, well, it matters. A ‘little+a little+a little+a little’ still doesn’t equal ‘A LOT’ – but it does equal SOMETHING. And a ‘something’ every day, 100% COUNTS by the time the weekend rolls around and you are ready for your ‘hard earned’ cheat day…’
I know this kind of sucks and 90% compliance is still pretty close to compliance, and it is 100% a lot better than most people are doing…but if you are ‘cheating’ around the edges of a plan then it is going to show-up on the body scanner.
So – there you have it. That’s what is going on. Maybe – I mean, that’s the sort of stuff that is probably happening if you set yourself a new years resolution OR a ‘post-challenge I’m gonna stick with it’ plan and you aren’t seeing the outcomes in terms of numbers on the scales or looser fitting clothing.
I hope it helped – see you in the gym,
Michael.
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