Cross-posted from TooFolk.com, now the home of Three Hundred Days... I won't be crossposting everything here but just posting here in case anyone wants to come along for the ride.
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Over the past thirty-seven days, I’ve learned a lot about myself.
I’ve specifically learned that I am capable of establishing good habits. Yesterday was the thirty-seventh day that I have worked out at the gym every consecutive day. Before I started, I really didn’t think it was possible. I mean I knew from a purely physical standpoint that I could do it, but history still said it wasn’t going to work.
In my life, I have “belonged” to various gyms for a total of probably five years. I had two years of membership at a gym in Wyoming Michigan (it might have been called Flex Fitness or something similar) and now over two years of membership at my current gym–Snap Fitness. That’s not including the employers I had that offered a fitness center (including my current one), apartment complexes that had them for my use, or the fact that I’ve beeen allowed to use the one at Grand Valley State University whenever I feel like it since 1996. If you added up every visit to every gym mentioned prior to May 8th of this year, you wouldn’t come up with thirty-seven visits… and yet that’s how many I’ve had in the last thirty-seven days.
I’ve also learned that trusting your instincts is different than trusting your doubts. The reason I didn’t commit intentional acts of exercise isn’t that I didn’t think it would be good for me or that I was incapable of doing it, it’s that I knew I hated it. But you know what? I don’t hate it. If you’re reading this (if anyone is reading this) there’s an excellent chance you’ve already heard me say how wrong I was about hating exercise. It doesn’t leave me drained, it gives me more energy. It doesn’t make me depressed, it makes me happy. Both of these were doubts I had that I treated like science, and only the experience of testing that science taught me that I was mistaken.
Finally–perhaps most significantly–I’ve learned that it isn’t all about my weight. I participated in Weight Watchers for over two years, and in that time I lost over thirty pounds. I was proud of that accomplishment, and I worked for it, but I was also in it for the name: I was there to watch my weight. Now before I say another word I want to say that I love the WW program, and I would recommend it to anyone. But my interpretation of it was not the recipe for my success. When WW worked for me, I would feel good, and I would take my progress on the scale and use it to adjust my confidence and self esteem. Sadly, the inverse was also true. WhenI would see smaller victories on the scale, or no progress, or a defeat, I would lose confidence and self esteem. I repeat: That’s not a criticism of Weight Watchers, they really stress the importance of Non-Scale Victories.
For me though, now that I’ve added this one new good habit, I don’t think so much about the weight anymore. I have lost weight (fourteen pounds as of this morning) with my new training regimen, but while it certainly makes me feel good, it isn’t why I keep going. I keep going because it feels good. I keep going because I’m getting healthier every day. I keep going because I want to live long enough to love the people who deserve my love as much as I can, and to receive as much of theirs as I possibly can. And if my weight goes down, that doesn’t change. If my weight stays the same, that doesn’t change. If my weight goes up, that doesn’t change.
When I started working out on “Day One,” with a goal of working out a the gym every day for thirty days, I didn’t think I would make it. I originally thought about announcing a goal of “Seven Days” in case I couldn’t do the thirty, but then I made it to seven. And fourteen. And twenty-eight (twenty-eight felt great) and finally thirty.
Then… thirty one… and it occured to me I didn’t have a goal anymore.
In Weight Watchers you set a “goal weight,” typically based on your scientifically determined Body Mass Index (BMI). According to that BMI, I should weigh 168 pounds. I have absolutely zero ability to imagine what I would look like at that weight, or what I would feel like, so to me setting that as an actual goal didn’t sound like a good idea. Anything I can’t even imagine isn’t something I can realistically pursue.
So if not a goal by the scale, what then?
I decided on a goal by the calendar, and it’s this: Three hundred days.
It sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? It’s definitely a big number. My first thought was 100 days but I have to be honest: it sounded two easy. Thirty-one days took a month of time, but time is all it took. All one hundred days is is that a couple more times. And why not something more biiiiiiiiiiiiig and cleeeeeean like a year? Why not three hundred sixty-five days? I thought about that and decided that one year of time was just a bit more than I could process. And actually, I found that when I think about the two increments… “three hundred days” sounds more challenging to me than “a year.”
But three hundred days of what?
Well let me say up front what it’s not: It’s not three hundred days of working out at the gym every day.I’ve already been in one situation where I was staying at a hotel and had to use their meager fitness facilities. Any days when I logistically can NOT make it to my gym will not be counted as days off, however. I am going to make sure I have workouts that will work anywhere. Three hundred days means three hundred days that guarantee thirty minutes each of focused physical activity, excluding chores. In other words if I play tennis, I’ll count that. If I mow my lawn, I won’t. If I go for a two mile walk around my area, I’ll count that. If I go for a two mile walk around the grocery store because I never put my lists in an order that makes sense, I won’t.
Some of my fitness friends have told me that you’re supposed to give your body one day per week to rest and recover, so I talked to my personal trainer about that. He said that you should indeed do that for your muscles when it comes to weight training, but if my “7th” day is some form of moderate cardio it’s not going to have any ill effects. He might also encourage the rest day if my goal was to bulk up, which it isn’t. My goal is to keep going, and keep getting healthier, and keep living.
For three hundred days, I will dedicate at least 1/48th of my life to the future I deserve. It’s hardly anything. But it’s something big.
I’m also going to spend some time learning. I’m going to read more about fitness, try to cook better and eat out less, learn more about how my body works and how it doesn’t work. The information I discover I will try to discuss at toofolk.com if you’re interested, and I’ll talk about my journey and results (of all types) at toofolk.com as well.
I’m also going to spend some time making mistakes. I have to acknowledge this now. I’m not saying in advance “I’m going to miss a day,” because only physical injury or significant illness will prevent that (and honestly if I’m injured or ill and advised to stay in bed, I will simply add however many days on to the end I need to to make them up, I hope anyone would forgive me for that accounting) but it does mean that I’m not going to look at any of the individual failures I might make and call my mission a failure. Take this morning for example: I overslept, and somehow used that to justify eating a terrible breakfast. Acknowledging in advance that things like that might happen from time to time is going to help me view them less emotionally and more realistically… to try to think about what happened and what I can learn from it… and I’ll talk about that at toofolk.com also.
I’m not going to pledge to update this journal every day. That doesn’t mean I won’t, but I know enough about blogs to know that the kiss of death for a young blog is the arbitrary promise to update it even when you might not have anything interesting to say. There may be days of zero updates and days of ten, I cannot say for certain. And what I do say, I don’t know if anyone will read… and I will not be hurt if nobody does.
Finally in terms of the three hundred day goal, that’s not an end-point. That’s not where I call it a win and hook up the pizza sauce IV… that’s just this goal on the way to the next goal… and there will surely be mini-goals along the way.
So that’s it. I have two hundred and sixty-three days to go. If anybody wants to come with me, I’ll spot you the first thirty-seven. :D