Kat & Tshepi

Hi There,

Welcome back. We hope you had a good week, working well on your goals and improving your life each day. We had a good quite week, a week of revived commitment to our 6-month weight loss and fitness journey. We managed to complete all our planned workouts for the week, we progressed on our resistance training by adding more volume on some exercises, the training is going well. We also continued with preparing our meals in advance, ensuring that we always have the planned meals at our disposal. We had become complacent with food preparation in the past few weeks, allowing our vegetables to run out and not replenishing them immediately, which was leading to eating less complex carbohydrates and eating more convenient and easily accessible simple carbohydrates such as white bread, so refocusing on this aspect was a good improvement on our nutrition this week. We also continued with the strict tracking and logging of calories we consume on daily basis. It is not a good way to live by numbers and definitely not easy, but we understand the benefits of counting our calories for this journey and we know that it does not mean we will live like this for the rest of our lives, this is just one tool amongst many that will help us to reach our goals. Our subconscious minds will start to build knowledge around the calories contained in the foods we eat and this will start to be naturally automated, eventually there will be no need to manually count and track calories.

Coming from the 3^rd months progress tracking a week ago, we were celebrating Tshepi’s success in meeting her 3^rd month targeted weight and at the same time dealing with Kat’s failure to hit the target. We had to review what worked well for both of us and what did not work well. We identified what was working, less snacking and nibbling, consistency in counting and tracking calories, being aware of changes in our routine and making efforts to be disciplined enough and not allow changes to influence our eating habits. We also identified the possible contributors to Kat’s failure to meet his target and figured ways to remedy the issues. One of the remedy is to ensure that the food items on our meal plans are always available and accessible to avoid alternative convenient but high calorie food items. It was painful for Kat to miss his 3^rd months weigh loss target, but this was a good motivator for him to be disciplined and recommit to the journey, and he has done that this week 🙂 . This leads us to this week’s topic, “Failure”.

1. Failure

Failure is that reality of not meeting one’s expectations after expending efforts to do so, it is the reality of not achieving a state that one desired. We are living in an imperfect world and we ourselves are not perfect either, and because of this, we can never fully live the life we always wish for and desire. At some point, everybody fails at some of the goals they planned to achieve, this is a reality that one needs to be aware of and accept. But this reality of failure, is an important aspect and a major contributor to one’s success. It is what inspires motivation and the ability to persevere in one’s life journey, it builds courage and the determination to pursue the desires that a person has. Through failure, a person is able to acknowledge the importance of what they were trying to achieve and can re-ignite the passion that was felt when they were starting their endeavour.

On a weight loss and fitness journey, the effects of failure are the same as in any other life’s journey. It feels painful and demotivating when you don’t meet your targeted weight or fitness level. But the experience of failure can be the stepping stone to attaining and exceeding a goal, or if one allows it, can be a damaging force that discourages and demotivates a person from trying a bit more and persevering on their journey 😦 , it is a matter of perception at the end of the day. As Henry Ford said, “failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently”, if a person perceive failure as a reality that gives insight into their plans, efforts and the need for improvement, then a person is able to treat failure as a welcomed contributor to success, as an opportunity to learn, start afresh and become better. For weight loss and fitness journey, failure gives a person an opportunity to review their lifestyle, their meal plans, their training program and the consistency of their efforts in carrying out the planned tasks and activities. Instead of giving up on the goal when the numbers on the scale are in variance to the expected numbers, one needs to take the numbers as feedback on their plans and efforts (it’s always great to get feedback), and use that feedback as an opportunity to tweak their plans and give the goal another go.

On our own fitness journey of just over 2 years, we have encountered failure on numerous occasions. We have failed more times than we have succeeded. We constantly fail each day on some aspects of our planned meals and training, but each time that we fail, we are able to painfully see the cause of the failure and try to improve the next day (and we often fail again and again on the same cause 🙂 ). The perseverance to try again and again no matter how many times is what has yielded the results we desired. When we experience failure, we feel the pain, we get angry, it is human nature, but we courageously go on. Our perception of failure is one of optimism, we always believe that there is a bright light at the end of the tunnel, and it is only through perseverance regardless of the current result that we soldier on until we reach the perceived light. Failure is a reality, but it is also temporary. Perceived optimistically, failure becomes a stepping stone that propels one to the pinnacle of success. Albert Einstein said it well when he stated that “Failure is success in progress”, successes are built on top of failures.

That’s all we have for this week. In the coming week, we will continue with a revived vigor and commitment on our goal. We will ensure that our planned food items are sufficient, readily available and easily accessible. We plan to continue the unbroken streak of training as planned. We will also keep trying to improve our weekend eating habits, this is where are failing the most, we keep failing each weekend, but this is success in progress 🙂 . Until next week, stay blessed.

Kat & Tshepi.