Hi There,
Welcome back to the blog. We hope you had a good week, and if you are on a fitness journey of your own, we hope all is going well. We had a hectic week, a week where we experienced all the spectrum of emotions, from excitement all the way to sadness. Life is really dynamic, you may prepare for all possible things that life can throw at you (and it is a great thing to prepare), but it is never a guarantee that you will manage well when the situations arises because life throws things at you in angles you have not even conceived yet. But such is life, a mysterious phenomenon.
In this week, we continued with preparing our meals in advance, this is no longer a question, it has become a must. We consistently tracked our calories each day as we committed to do so, this is a winning formula by far. We also followed our training program to the T, it is getting easier and easier to stick to our program. Our eating habits however, took a swing to the negative due the varied emotions we experienced and the mindset we had of celebrating the goal we reached in the prior week.
Our week began by finalizing the plans for a charity walk(8km) we had organized for our local old age home. We requested our local community members to donate grocery and toiletry items for the old age home, so we busied ourselves with organizing and managing this event. It was hectic, we are certain that we undermined the work load and stress that goes into organizing such an event, but we are happy and thank God that we were able to carry-out the work, we believe it was a success.
But with organizing the event, juggling our normal family and work demands, as well as the elation of losing 2kgs as planned still fresh in our minds, we found ourselves vulnerable to the temptations of overconsuming certain type of foods, those that are not in our meal plan….and they are not in our plan for a reason but we ignored this part 🙂 . The results of this overconsumption are quite clear on the scale, Kat suffered the most than Tshepi. Now we have to work hard to undo the damage done on our progress, this brings us to this week’s topic “Self-Control”.
1. Self-Control
If ever there was a common condition that we as humans struggle with to reach our potential and achieve our desired goals in life, it would be a lack of self-control. A lack of self-control denies us the opportunity to reach all the good things that would make our lives fulfilling, the things that would leave us with awe at night when we go to bed , saying this is a good life that I am living. Self-Control is simply “the ability to control oneself, in particular one’s emotions and desires, especially in difficult situations”.
When it comes to weight loss, self-control is at the top of requirements to succeed in losing weight. It is in relation to the food we consume, we are mostly unhealthy and carrying around excess weight due to the food choices we make. We are somehow driven to satisfy our emotions through the foods we eat instead of satisfying our hunger, and our emotions suggests to us that sugary or fatty foods are the standard that will meet satisfaction, and more and more will do 🙂 . The desire for such foods really challenges the ability to control oneself. If we give in to the call of sugary and fatty foods, we lose the battle on weight loss.
It is common to hear a say “You are what you eat”, if this is true then it is not a nice reference when one thinks about who they are when all they eat is junk food. If one makes good food choice and eat healthy they might start to think of themselves as healthy. Perhaps there might be some truth to the say “You are what you eat”. To make good food choices and eat healthily requires self-control, the convenience and abundance of fast and unhealthy foods makes it harder to control oneself. It is a constant struggle that we are faced with on daily basis everywhere we go. It is therefore critical to build a certain level of self-control when it comes to food in order to achieve ones weight loss and fitness goals.
On our weight loss and fitness journey we struggled a lot with self-control in relation to food and training, and we are still struggling as highlighted earlier. We know very well that we are not top of the cream when it comes to self-control and instead we have addictive personalities. What has helped us to stay the course and make some progress on our journey was to alter our environment in small ways to give us an upper hand in winning. We realized that when the foods that we plan not to eat are available in the house, we will find a way to eat them, if the snacks are visible and easily accessible, we will get to them when we are feeling down. So we stopped buying foods and snacks that are not on our meal plan and therefore removed availability and access. But because we have kids, and they enjoy the snacks, we allow them to buy only a few snacks at a time and we store them in a very small bottom drawer in the kitchen whereby if we try to reach them we would ask ourselves what are we doing there (this is a trap 🙂 ). When we go out, we avoid fast food restaurants, we initially were visiting fast food restaurant in the hope of finding some healthy foods but we soon realized there is not, even what is considered healthy (how hopeful were we 🙂 ) .
In his book Atomic Habits, James Clear mentions that some of the great disciplined people alter their environments to make things easier for them to achieve their goals, and he further states that “You don’t have to be the victim of your environment. You can also be the architect of it”. Therefore, to improve self-control , it is worth it to alter your environment and eliminate easy access and availability to make things easier for you to reach your goal. And this can be applied in other areas on the fitness journey, just like what we did when winter approached, we found it hard to go to the home gym we had setup in another room a bit far from our bedroom, so we moved the dumbbells to the bedroom so that it is easier for us to just wake up and train, it is laziness but it is working like magic for us 🙂 . Sometimes it is the simple changes that make big differences.
That’s it for this week, we hope to keep making our environment favorable for our goal and to keep looking at other areas where we can make improvements, such as at the grocery store, we have noticed that going through the aisles is exposing us to temptations, perhaps it is a good idea to be selective about the aisles we go through. It is not a bad idea to just visit the fruits and vegetable section, pay and leave the store. Until then, stay blessed.
Kat & Tshepi
Kat & Tshepi 