365 New Year's Days

Happy New Year!

If you're considering starting the cheap man's plan, there's often no better day than today. All the major calorie buster holidays are behind you, and you'll have fewer interruptions in your new routine of counting calories and walking off pounds.

The keys to success with any plan are really motivation, consistency and perseverance. If you have those, you will succeed. If you aren't really motivated, you should work on that first by creating your list of benefits of losing weight and find a motivational quote to keep telling yourself. They both help a great deal.

However, there is really no better motivator than success and no bigger discourager than failure. That's why I really recommend starting when you have the fewest upcoming interruptions in your new routine. This way, you'll set yourself up for success early by putting a pound or two on the scoreboard by week's end and use that as a motivational springboard into week two. If you have a big out of town wedding coming up this weekend, maybe wait until the following Monday.

Any day can be New Year's Day in terms of starting out your new plan. The key is picking a day that doesn't fall right before a gastronomical mine field of a social or travel schedule. If you already have several weeks of weight loss behind you before you have to manage a major routine disruptor, you'll be much better attitudinally equipped to deal with some unavoidable scheduling setbacks.

Just remember that your weight will fluctuate a lot, so don't come home from that disruptor thinking that you flushed away three weeks of progress on the scale in one weekend. That's not your true weight, and it will normalize again after a couple of days. Remember, I woke up one day 6 pounds heavier than I did the day before 1 Christmas party. Just laugh it off and keep plugging away. Excess body fat is no match for the consistent long-term application of your plan, and it cannot escape the math of your calorie log.

Comments

Weekly Updates (2/9/2018)

Week one of BUD/S training is going OK. I can do everything but all the sit-ups (and of course the swimming, due to the lack of pool). The best I could bang out with sit-ups were 2 sets of 20, 1 of 15 and 1 of 10. But, at least I haven't experienced any soreness yet. Just the little bit of additional activity has me losing even slightly more weight. I'm holding my weight under the 40 pound loss benchmark on the scale every day now, and I'm feeling really good. I've almost forgotten how much I enjoyed running, which I'm sure has a lot to do with how much less of a strain it is on my body. I'm not going to lie - it was nothing short of exhilarating holding down the weight button on the treadmill for as long as it took to reduce the weight setting from 198 to 157- my weight from the last time I set it. It was definitely a bizarre experience. After the PowerWatch bust, I decided to try out another activity tracker watch. So, I ordered a Garmin Fenix 5X. It's

Carrying All That Extra Weight Around Is Stupid and Inefficient

If you have a hard time thinking of good reasons for losing weight, how about you try carrying a Thanksgiving turkey around in a backpack everywhere, every day and see how you feel. I'll spare you the trouble: you'll feel horrible. Granted, carrying all the weight you need to lose (give or take) in the form of a Butterball suspended from your back is much more uncomfortable than having it spread over your body throughout your face and all the way down to your toes, but it'll give you some idea of all the extra work your body has to do every day in getting you from point A to B. I remember dismissing all the chatter about how being overweight makes you excessively fatigued as fitness freak happy talk, but it's true. I used to be tired all the time and just chalked it up to the way a normal person feels after a full day's work. And, when I initially started this plan, I felt even worse because I was not only fat and tired but now hungry and grouchy too. But, as the

Cheapo Hacks: The $0 Haircut

Cutting my own hair is one of the things I've always wanted to do but never could work up the nerve to actually try until recently. I know many bald guys have been doing it for a while - one of the few perks of losing your hair, I'd imagine. Just buzz what's left as tight as you want, and you're done. But, for those of us who've managed to hold onto our hair on top of our head a little longer, cutting your hair seems like a very risky proposition. I work an office job, so keeping a low profile for a week or two after royally screwing up isn't really an option. This made the economics of trying it more trouble than it was worth, or so I thought. After all, if it was so easy, why do no one other than bald guys cut their own hair? I didn't know of any. $20 after tip every couple of months seemed like a pretty pointless amount of money to worry about, even for a cheapo. Part of the problem, however, was that I'd either have to hurry over after work

The Cheap Man's Weight Loss Plan

Search This Blog

Start Here First: