Hi There,
Welcome back to the blog, how was your week? We hope it was a good one. We had a good week, Tshepi and kids were on Term 1 school holidays, this reduced a lot of our daily tasks and gave us a bit of free time to focus on our training and to complete some of the house chores that have been outstanding for a while. The kids certainly enjoyed waking up a bit late, freely watched a lot of TV and indulged on daily home cooked meals (what a lucky week for them 🙂 ). Tshepi also enjoyed a bit of time to herself, she was stressed a bit about the workload she brought home but she tried to manage and balance the outstanding workload and the family responsibilities whilst giving herself some alone time. She is always in superwoman mode 🙂 , which seems to be a must at the moment for this household.
We are now approaching the end of the 3rd month of our 6-months weight loss and fitness journey, YEY we are almost halfway there. We are starting to look and feel a bit leaner and fit, hopefully it is not our imagination and false expectations. At the same time we are starting to feel the effects of being in a long caloric deficits, our bodies are on a hunt for more food to store. In this week we managed to eat as per our meal plans with just a few deviations( weekends are tough 😦 ). We continued to track our calories closely each day to ensure we are as close and accurate as possible to our targeted calorie intake. We also remained consistent with our training programme, and managed to squeeze in 3 x 5km walks due to the free time afforded to us by the school holidays. The opportunity to burn extra +/-300 calories on these walks was quite handy.
Due to the scarcity of frequent free time on our daily schedule and family life, we certainly were motivated to make the most of the free time we got this week to contribute to our weight loss and fitness progress, and this brings us to this week’s topic “Motivation”.
1. Motivation
Motivation is that essential invisible force that drives us as human beings to act in anticipation of changing our current state to our desired state. It propels us to initiate actions that would make us better people in certain areas of our lives if not all areas. We are motivated by the desire to change, to resolve a problem, to achieve a goal. Without motivation we slide into the netherworld of procrastination, we become stale and lose the flavor of life. With motivation, life becomes dynamic, it opens up multiple doors of opportunities to create one’s desired future.
When it comes to weight loss and fitness journey, motivation is that spice that you sprinkle to add a little bit of flavor and interest in the somewhat bland food. At the beginning of a journey , the motivation is high and in abundance as well as on auto-pilot, it does not take much to get motivated in the beginning. However, as time flies by, the motivation weans down to a faint musical note which requires constant amplification throughout the journey. When the realities of the journey surfaces, when the food becomes boring, the training start to feel like a punishment, and when the weight loss is not working out as anticipated, this is where motivation starts to dip and it becomes a constant struggle to continue carrying out the planned tasks.
On our fitness journey, we have experienced a lack of motivation on many occasions and still are experiencing it to this day. There are days where we don’t feel like eating the same food, where we don’t feel like training as planned, days where we have no interest in opening up an App to track calories. In these days where we lack motivation and interest, we do fail and not do as we initially planned and that is okay. We however, go back to where we started, we re-live the start of our journey, we re-visit the vision we created at the beginning, we simply remind ourselves ‘WHY WE STARTED’. Going back to that time when we started the journey, the thoughts and emotions we had at the time, the potential of our goal, revitalize the same feelings we had. This somehow starts to rebuild the motivation to continue and before we know it we are back on track, eating and training as planned. It helps to repeatedly echo to yourself “Remember why you started”.
Other things that help us with motivation, is accountability for each other. When one is down and unmotivated, the other tries their best to be up and motivational. We also immense and surround ourselves with a lot of fitness content, reading fitness magazines, watching fitness videos, following fitness personalities on social media. This makes our goal to always be on our minds, as they say “Out of sight, out of mind”, if you don’t constantly see something you start not to think about it and it starts to lose relevance in your life, then a decline in motivation follows. Motivation requires constant and intentional efforts to build, which can be very hard when you are feeling low, but when you think of the underlying reason you are on a fitness journey, which is to become a better version of yourself, you suddenly feel that spike of motivation and a nudge to wake up, eat well and train hard.
That’s it for this week. As the 3rd progress tracking is closing in, we will be giving it our all in this week to make our 3rd months target. It is going to be challenging but we will try. We will also be going back to our normal routine as the kids will be going back to school, we hope the change will not affect our planned training. We will keep finding new and better ways to motivate ourselves to carry on regardless of the challenges we face, and remind ourselves that we have no better option than to become the best version of ourselves. Stay blessed and see you next week.
Kat & Tshepi
Kat & Tshepi 