Archive for June, 2005
Faster Than I Thought
I successfully completed my 24 hour fast. I enjoyed the experience a great deal. It wasn’t challenging, particularly, and I found it interesting that I wasn’t very hungry. Drinking tons of water helped that. I did, however, find some interesting things.
1.) I think I’ll fast once a week from now on as a test of discipline.
2.) I learned more about my emotional eating points from this.
3.) I learned I have new bad habits to break.
I like the discipline of telling my body that I intend to accomplish something outside its normal parameters. Kind of like running the marathon. I told my body to expect to be thrashed for several hours, and then I executed against that. This feels the same.
When I feel emotional, I feel hungry. Stress, especially. That seems to be the biggest trigger. I also seem to still want to use food as a reward. I say this because yesterday, when I felt stressed, I thought about eating. When I finished a project I was working on for a while, I thought about getting myself a snack. So, without fasting, I wouldn’t have known.
I learned that my drive home suppers, even though I’m eating out of Trader Joe’s (kind of all natural grocery store stuff, but inexpensive), I’m eating more because of traffic stress, which is why I seem more hungry and why I’m not losing an ounce.
Scale-wise, I showed a 3 pound drop from this one day. I think that’s fairly bogus, but it’s just something I’m noting here. Definitely NOT a good way to lose weight.
When I decided to eat again, I started with a leftover smoothie Kat had made me. It tasted good, but it wasn’t satisfying. Why? Because I wanted something MENTALLY/EMOTIONALLY rewarding. Another discovery. The food was more of an icon than nourishment at that moment. And that’s interesting, too.
I think fasting, for me, falls into the category of proving that I am committed to my vision. That’s why I might keep it around a while longer. Thanks for everyone’s comments on the matter.
Template Help
Obviously, I changed my template. What I’m stupid about is that I can’t change my template to add back in Haloscan. Can someone smarter than me look at my source and tell me what I did wrong and/or where to add it?
Discipline
Today, I am fasting. I have never successfully fasted in my life. I’m doing it to prove something to myself. It’s about discipline and not weight loss.
Vision is seeing with the mind’s eye what is possible. Discipine is paying the price to bring vision to reality. Passion is the drive that sustains the discipline to achieve the vision. And conscience is the inward moral sense what is write and wrong. (to paraphrase Covey.)
I’m working on this integration theory and I see things much more clearly. In fact, once I changed the way I was looking at things, it’s as if all the dominos all started falling in the right order.
Now, want to hear a big whoops?
I’m at the gym doing squats today, and I’m SO proud of myself. I’m listening to my iPod and throwing plate after plate up on the bar and squatting. Not deeply, but I’m moving a lot of weight around. 385 again. So, I drop the weight down to three big 45 pound plates on a side plus the bar (315). I do two more squats. I then proceed to remove the plates from one side. (Get it?)
Here’s the bar: ——–III
I hear this weird “ting” sound over the roar of Metallica, and I look back towards the rest of Gold’s Gym, wondering what happened. ALL of Gold’s Gym is looking at me. I turn and find what caused the noise.
Turns out the bar did this HUGE scary catapult action and made a really loud noise as it crashed hard into the area where a beautiful slender woman was moments-before doing deadlifts with a bare bar. Oh dear. It would’ve crushed her like a bug and ruined both our lives forever.
Sure, I know how to properly unload a bar. It was a complete oversight. I am not used to loading bars up as much as that. I felt bad. In fact, I cleaned up the mess, showered, and left the gym. I’ll be back. I just wanted to escape the scene of my crime. No weightlifters were hurt during the shooting of that film.
I’m learning lots about integrating my health efforts to the other areas of my life, and it’s really boosting my results. I’ll tell you more about that later.
How are you?
Integrity
If you read Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and got a lot out of it, I highly recommend his new book, The 8th Habit. I find that it dovetails well with the original teachings, and it adds a new dimension to things. I am learning a lot, and I find that the things I learn there apply to all aspects of my life. That’s the thing I’m chewing on today, in a good way.
Integrity.
Covey was calling it the integrated-ness of body, mind, heart, and soul. He was saying that by learning to follow your conscience, one learns to become stronger in personal choice, personal self-management, and that these types of private victories carry forward into one’s efforts in empathizing and learning from others, as well as communcating and socializing for purposes of greater good. I love the notion. Let me break it down again.
Self-motivated: personal choice, the ability to take better control of the gap between stimulus and response.
Self-regulated: meaning having the discipline to focus on the things you decide matter the most, and to keep the plane pointed towards one’s goals.
Empathy: Understanding others, and getting past our personal autobiographies to better understand what’s in the heads of others.
Better Socializing and Communcation: being able to apply your personal voice to foster understanding and teaching of others.
Working to integrate the body, the mind, the heart, and the soul is what gives one a stronger sense of self. And with concrete tasks, not just putting those words out there to hang in the abstract. It means the fitness and nutrition efforts. It means reading broadly and outside my personal vocation, to learn and understand more. It means learning to be more trustworthy and caring. It means working towards higher purposes through focusing on this very integrity.
Sure blows the doors of just thinking about a diet and weightlifting, eh?
When you view it from multi-faceted levels like this, I find it’s easier to stay more focused on the greater results. This is just a heavy-handed way of saying that I think one cannot have lasting success with any major goals (fitness, nutrition, career, family, etc) without staying focused on the larger effort of working on all aspects of one’s life.
But then, your mileage may vary. What do you think? Did you read Covey’s stuff? Do you find much value in it? What works of this nature inspired you or taught you more about yourself? Do you still follow what you learned?
