READ: Welcome to Luckortunity! You will only see this once but I invite you to keep coming back and browse through the archives to Help Yourself Get Lucky. To get started, read 40 Ways to Increase Your Luck.
You can subscribe to my RSS feed and get lucky all the time. Thanks for visiting!
I have always been somewhat conscious of my weight. I remember when I was 80 lbs. and I would hold down on the counter while weighing myself to add on some weight and make me feel a little bigger. It wasn’t long after that when I hit 100 lbs. I gained a lot of weight that year. In high school and college I played regular competitive sports and always kept at my ideal weight. In high school while playing basketball I didn’t have to do much work since I was a teenager with a fast metabolism who played ball all day long. In college, I wrestled and had to keep my weight exactly at my weight class limit. When I graduated, the activity slowed down considerably and over the last few years, I have packed on close to 50 pounds. It seems like a lot but when I was wrestling, I was at 7% body fat which is way below normal for the average person.
I finally got fed up 2 weeks ago when I had trouble getting into my pants. I looked around for a diet, started it up and I am glad to say that I have already lost over 8 lbs. If you are interested in the diet, you can find it on Tim Ferris’s blog. For those of you who are interested, in college i wrestled in the 165 and 174 weight classes and since graduation, i have gone up as high as 220. When I started the diet, I was 216 and I am currently about 207.
I came to the realization that dieting can be easy. Here are some of the things I have learned that can make your diet easier for you:
- If you love to eat, pick a diet that allows you to eat a lot. I chose a diet that allows me to eat 4 large meals each day and even have some snacks in between if I am hungry. The diet I am on just leaves out the white carbs and has a few other restrictions. The best thing is that if I am craving carbs and really want to cheat, all I have to do is have an intensive workout for about 30 minutes or so.
- Use a Support System. The most important factor to you keeping to your diet is a support system. You can use a friend who is also dieting with you so that you can share your successes. Your family can also be a good choice to cheer you on. I have my wife who tells me she is proud of me for getting healthy and she prepares my meals for me. I could not do it without her. There is also a website Lose Win Situation that lets you get sponsors to pledge money to your favorite charity for your weight loss.
- Have a goal. Having a goal gives you a realistic idea of how much weight you want to lose and why you want to lose it. Everyone wants to be healthy but everyone also has their own reason to want it. I want to be able to play games and run around with my kids and last as long as they do.
- Don’t use a diet that is too strict for you. If you know that you will crave chocolate, cake, ice cream or any other treat, don’t choose a diet that will make you give them up forever. On my diet, I have one day a week where I can eat anything that I want including all of the above. Apparently, over eating junk food once a week helps weight loss on this diet.
- Do your research. There are so many diets out there. Some claim to help you lose 30 lbs. in a month and others tell you that you can’t lose more than 2 lbs. per week. Many diets will work and many will not. Before trying out a diet, do a little research and find out how it works and why it works. Find out about what it will cause to go on in your body. If it seems like it will work, it is not unhealthy and it seems like something you can do from beginning to end, try it out. If it works, great, if it doesn’t, don’t get discouraged and try a new diet.
If you liked this article, please consider buying me a cup of coffee.If you enjoyed this post, please share it by clicking the button of your choice below. Thanks.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
March 11 2008 | Dieting | No Comments »
1. You don’t want it badly enough!
When you want something badly enough, you get obsessed with it. You buy books and magazines on the subject, you network with other people who have accomplished what you would like to accomplish and you do everything in your power to accomplish it yourself.
My 3 year old lets me know when he wants something and trust me, he doesn’t let me forget it. He reminds me about it every single day, multiple times. He even throws it in to conversation out of nowhere for example the conversation below:
Me: Do you want to go play outside
My Son: Yeah, and then tomorrow you can go buy my toy for me.
Pretty much, if you want something badly enough, you breath it.
2. You don’t know how to get there.
The reason that most people haven’t accomplished their goals, be it weight or financial status, is because they just don’t know how to do it. They may know that you have to exercise and diet but they don’t know what exercises to do and what to eat. Even if they do know what exercises to do, they don’t use proper form or know how often to do them. They also don’t know how often to switch them up for other exercises or change the intensity. Many people know about all sorts of diets but they don’t know enough about one diet to have any success with it.
Some people think that since the Atkins diet forbids carbs and people on the diet lose a lot of weight, then carbs must be evil. They then look at the South Beach diet and see that carbs are not evil so they start having carbs again. People like to pick and choose what they like best about each diet or exercise. But, doing that, they are sure to fail.
If you really want to be successful at anything, you must educate yourself. You can read books and follow them exactly, or you can hire a nutritionist or personal trainer. Just do your research and make sure that they are reliable. No one said losing weight was easy. It takes a lot of hard work, including the homework beforehand.
3. You like to eat too much.
If you are anything like me, you really like to eat. Eating is so enjoyable that sometimes I eat just because food is there. Subconsciously I think that even after I am full, I will get the same satisfaction that I will get when I was hungry. I then keep eating until I can’t eat anymore. It’s like a drug addict trying to get a comparable high to his first great experience.
If you are serious about losing weight, you must want it badly enough and teach yourself to enjoy food a little bit at a time. Think to yourself that you had enough now but you will have more in a few hours at your next meal. It takes some training but it is worth it.
4. You don’t like to exercise.
There are plenty of ways to exercise and burn some calories and they don’t all consist of walking aimlessly on a treadmill. Being overweight is not a natural condition. The human body is so complex and it is incredible to learn how it functions. People should be naturally burning the calories that they need to burn to keep in shape, without any real effort. It is only with modern technology, TV, office jobs and lack of movement that People, specifically Americans get overweight and need to exercise to burn additional calories.
Here are some easy ways to burn more calories during your day:
· Stand up and pace while you are on the phone
· Take stairs instead of elevators
· Sit on the floor instead of a couch to watch TV (it is proven that you move more and burn more calories like this).
· Park at the end of a parking lot to get more walking done.
· Walk to close by places instead of driving.
· Ride your bike or rollerblade to places a little further.
In addition to the examples above, you can also try playing team sports which can be a lot of fun, you just need to make time for them which brings me to my last point.
5. You don’t have time.
The truth is, if something is important to you, you will make time for it. Think of anything that you really wanted badly in life and notice that you were able to make time for it. If it is important, you will find the time somewhere. It might mean cutting out some TV time, some sleep, a couple hours on weekends or even your lunch breaks.
The good thing is that exercising doesn’t have to replace any part of your life so making time for it is not that hard. If you want to spend time with family and friends, you can play a game of ball with them instead of going to a movie. If you want to watch more TV, you can get on a treadmill with a TV in front of it.
Being too tired doesn’t work as an excuse either since exercising actually gives you more energy. Imagine that, if you start exercising, you may create a new time slot to fill in your day since you will be more energized.
If you liked this article, please consider buying me a cup of coffee.If you enjoyed this post, please share it by clicking the button of your choice below. Thanks.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
February 25 2008 | Dieting | No Comments »
Picture this. You are 20 pounds overweight on December 20th, New Years is right around the corner. This is the perfect time to make a new years resolution. You are more than determined to get to your goal weight and you decide to start the moment that the ball drops in Time Square. You plan for the next 11 days how you plan to lose the weight. NO more eating after 8:00 PM, cut out 10% of your calories, drink less soda and alcohol and more water and finally start exercising like you’ve been wanting to for as long as you can remember.
Since you are extremely determined and organized, you whip out your laptop or a notebook and start making charts of what you need to do, how you are going to track yourself and set clear goals. You feel great about yourself and completely prepared for January 1st when your new lifestyle will start. You are going to be great!
Well, you still have a week and a half to go until you have to change your lifestyle so you might as well enjoy yourself while you can, after all, you won’t be able to indulge yourself for a long time.
A few large meals later, maybe some late night drinking, snacks in bed while watching a movie and holiday dinners, you look at the scale and are somewhat disappointed that you now have an extra 5 pounds to lose. You’re not as optimistic about your new years resolution at this point but you are still determined.
New Years Eve comes and you find yourself at a party with food and drinks going late into the night. You may choose to partake thinking that “the diet starts tomorrow” or you may hold back which can be the ultimate temptation. Whatever the case, the next morning is going to be very hard and keeping to your new program will get harder each day. The percentage of people that come to this point and stick to the program are (from my experiences) very low.
LUCKORTUNITY
The Luckortunity over here is to always start things right away. Never push things off because they will get harder and harder as time goes on. The greatest chance you have at succeeding is moving ahead at full force when the idea hits your head. A new idea, whether it’s your own or someone else’s, can give you a high that will give you the extra push to get things done. If you start on that note, you have a better chance of building momentum to keep going toward your goal.
My new year’s resolution for 2008 is to get lucky. Lucky in general, in everything I do in life, from business to social to family and everything in between. This post is the beginning of me keeping to my new year’s resolution. I know that it’s not January 1st yet but I figure a few things; first, if I start now, it will get me in motion so that by New Years I will already be well on my way and have enough inertia to keep going. Second, if I start now, it will be pretty pathetic of me to not even make it to New Years for my New Year’s resolution so I will be forced to keep it up. Lastly, starting early, working hard and being persistent are some of the keys to getting lucky.
I wrote on the Luckortunity (or introduction) page that there is a major difference between “chance” and “luck”. “Chance” is winning the lottery, something people can hope for but “luck” is something people can strive for. I am convinced that every single person in the world has the potential to be lucky on a regular basis. Through this blog, I am going to go through my own personal luck and give you tips on becoming lucky yourself.
If you liked this article, please consider buying me a cup of coffee.
If you enjoyed this post, please share it by clicking the button of your choice below. Thanks.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
December 04 2007 | Dieting and Goals | 1 Comment »
