Skip to main content

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

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Mechanics

Ok, now that you've read through the high level stuff, let's get down to brass tacks: The reality is, you're going to want to make some changes to your daily routine, but how much you do depends on how much you want to lose and how quickly you want to lose it. There's nothing wrong with going at a slower pace, but I would just advise that you adjust your diet enough that you're seeing enough consistent enough gains that you stick with it. Remember, as long as you're still logging food, odds are you're still losing weight. I've already mentioned that you'll need a pedometer or fitness tracker. That needs to become a permanent extension of your body. You don't need to be a gym rat (in fact, you should have already cancelled your gym membership by now), but it's hard to be completely sedentary and still run calorie deficits. Or, put another way, a little bit of activity will give you a lot more wiggle room in your diet every day. A 10,000...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

Intro - The Plan

Welcome! Presumably, you've arrived here because you're drawn to two of my favorite hobbies: losing weight and saving cash. Until 5 months ago, I thought that each of those two things were incompatible with the other. I always thought that being fit meant either getting used to shelling out big bucks for expensive gym memberships and overpriced health food, or that saving money meant getting used to back pains from your wide-ass sitting on a fat wallet after passing over the high-price hipster wrap shop for a $1.50 McDouble. Well, I'm happy to report that you can indeed lose weight on the cheap with minimal sacrifices to your current lifestyle. On July 10, 2017 I weighed 198 lbs and as of December 21, 2017, I now weigh 160 lbs. I have not set one foot in the gym, on a treadmill or lifted any weights, and I have saved several thousand dollars in food costs. I'm not here to sell anything. I'm just sharing my strategy. The weight loss industry is built on...
Post a Comment
Read more