Hi There,
Welcome back to Kat & Tshepi blog. We hope you had a lovely week and that the stars were shining upon you. Our week was deep and unique, we time travelled to the beginning of our journey and made some drastic changes on our nutrition plan. Our journey is certainly not a smooth one, each week feels like an episode of survivor TV show whereby we are thrown into a deep end of a problem we need to overcome to complete our journey 🙂 .
In this week, we managed to continue with our training program, no curved ball on this aspect and we are happy with that. A curved ball was only reserved for our nutrition plan, we found ourselves feeling too restricted by our nutrition plan, not only on our physiology but the effects reverberated to our entire being. We resolved to eliminating the caloric restrictions we set for ourselves and allowed our body and rationale to dictate our satiety. This change obviously had an impact on our weight loss progress, but the accommodation of the change was required due to the intensity of the curve ball. This brings us to this week’s topic “Essence of the Journey”.
1. Essence of the Journey
In life, we are continuously challenged to transform from one state to the other with the hope that the other state would be better than the current state. We set goals and set out on a journey of the unknown, with a conceived vision of the future state as our only defense of sanity and source of encouragement. The vision is what gives meaning to the journey, the end goal is what carries us through the tumultuous peaks and dips of the journey. If we lose sight of the vision or allow it to fade through the hardships of the journey, then the journey starts to emerge as a blend, unexciting monotonous occurrence of life, the journey looses taste. In this state, we have lost the essence of the journey.
How do we lose the essence of the journey? how do we lose the lifeblood of our endeavor? One possible reason is the intensity of the sacrifice, when we get to a point where the sacrificial demands of the journey exceeds our actual ability to handle the sacrifice. This is the point where our vision is bordering between realistic and unrealistic fringe of expectations. At this point in the journey, we are asking too much of ourselves, we are not living the journey, instead the journey is living us. The essence of the journey is the enhancement of our lives that is derived from setting out on a journey. If what we are doing is not enhancing our lives, then something needs to be done about it.
Over the course of our fitness journey, we have definitely encountered the loss of essence of what we were doing at the time, the multiple projects and challenges we have set for ourselves but we had to overcome such eventualities and be able to proceed on our journey. This is the feeling we are currently experiencing on our 6 months’ weight loss and fitness journey, the restrictions on our nutrition feels beyond our capabilities at this stage. It feels like we are not enhancing our lives by restricting our calories, we are losing the essence of our journey.
With one week left before the end of our journey, we somehow need to revive the essence of our journey so that we can complete it. In attempting to do this, we firstly scaled down the restriction on our nutrition this week, we have been eating a little bit more than usual. This is affecting our weight loss progress but the feeling of not being restricted is enhancing our lives, we are feeling free. Secondly, we reflected and acknowledge the positive benefits we have reaped on this journey, there are a lot (we will be sharing them post our journey). Thirdly, we started looking ahead at the possibilities that are facing us once we complete this journey in the next week, it is exciting to think about and it inspires us to complete the current journey.
In summary, we are reviving the essence of our journey by seeking enhancement from the past, present and the future of our existence.
- Enhancement from the Past – We acknowledge and appreciate the progress made so far, the benefits outweigh the losses.
- Enhancement from the present – We have eliminated the source of our loss, restrictive diet. This negatively impact our weight loss progress but reclaiming freedom is more important and beneficial to move forward.
- Enhancement from the future –The completion of a journey brings about exciting possibilities of departure for future projects, this is regardless of whether the destination fulfilled the initial expectations.
That’s it for this week, we hope that focusing on enhancing our lives instead of centering our attention on restrictions will help us salvage what we can in the last week of our journey. In the coming week, we will be tracking progress for the last month of our six month’s journey. As we are approaching our destination, thinking about all that we encountered on this journey, a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson about life comes to mind “it’s the not the destination, it’s the journey”, one cannot help to think how true and relevant this is to our journey. Until next week, stay blessed.
Kat & Tshepi
Kat & Tshepi 