Dealing with failure and overcoming it

What is failure? What is it like to fail?

I haven’t binged since I begun, but every now and then I keep eating small cheat meals, so that I don’t get tempted for bigger ones. That, however, is still failure for me at some level. The journey on the path of fitness is a constantly evolving one. There are so many things you can explore and learn, about your own body, and with each step you get closer. Here are some of the things I have learnt during my journey so far.

Patience.

Perseverance.

Priorities.

These are the things I still have to learn.

Discipline.

Organization.

Calm.

When you start working out, it is generally just to lose weight. Weight loss is one of the biggest motivators, or mostly because of personal reasons such as people taunting you, making fun of you and the like. At the core of all of this, is anger. Anger is sometimes the biggest motivator. The problem with anger is that it is short lived. I have come down to 20% body fat now, and I’ve realized that I’ve run out of all my anger. Everything I had pent up within me, all of the frustration, it’s all going away slowly. I’m not saying I’m fit. I’m not even saying that I’m over my binge eating problem. I may fail. I may give up again.

But I’ve got clarity like never before.

When you watch all of these motivational videos and trainers speak, and you’re not that much into fitness, you’ll roll your eyes every time they tell you that getting a six pack is not all that important and having strength is more important. I mean what do they know right? It’s quite evident that everyone around you likes calling guys hot, and more often than not those guys tend to have abs. In fact, the trainer who’s telling you to focus on fitness is doing so without a shirt, flaunting his chiseled body at the camera. It is a study in hypocrisy.

My goal now, is to reach peak physical fitness, no matter what.

Think of it this way, when you are at peak physical fitness, you are bound to look good and probably even have abs. But what’s more important is that you will be in full control of your body. You will be at mental peace. I love opening my cupboard now. I haven’t lost all that much of weight but the weight loss has been enough for me to fit into my clothes again, and I love trying on new things I never even knew I had in my wardrobe. I’m kind of a hoarder that way. I used to buy clothes and say to myself ‘I’ll wear these when I’m in shape’ That day never came because I always gave up on my diet and my workout routine. It was always the same excuse. I was this close to my results and then some birthday, some party, some treat came up. Before I knew it, I was back on the drive.

Not this time though.

I don’t know if it is because I’m writing about it, or because I have a changed outlook towards the whole concept of eating, but I don’t feel the drive anymore. I don’t pass a roadside and think to myself,”Yeah I need to gorge down all these things”. It may have been due to the change in lifestyle or the fact that I feel accountable to all my readers (even if it might be just one). If you were to fail and eat a bit too much, what would happen?

Previously I’d feel the guilt. It was so heavy on me. It used to sit on my shoulders and keep menacing me about how useless I am and how it’s all over. And that’s the worst part. When your mind start steering your guilt towards “What does it even matter anymore? Why diet now? Why workout? You just ruined it all”, that is the place where you go back into binge eating. This is the one thought that you are supposed to avoid at all costs. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about binge eating or anything else. When you are persevering towards something with all your might and you fail, the one thought you should not listen to is where your mind tells you its all over now, and that you should just go back to the way things were.

Getting out of your comfort zone is difficult because your mind is comfortable in that zone. It doesn’t want to come out, and it will look for each and every opportunity to try and make you go back. In such a situation you cannot really listen and obey. You have to fight it. You had a bad binge? No biggie, start again tomorrow. If you have been working out well and your diet has been good, your body will get rid of the junk in a week or two. Just keep your resolve. Don’t feel bad and go back to that lifestyle again.

I’ve reached a point of stagnancy now. Nothing is changing. I’ve gotten to about 79 kg but nothing is happening past that. I think this is the part where I have to be patient. This would previously have been the part where I give up.

Not anymore.

I’m going to keep trying harder and striving towards perfection. This isn’t some race where I’m trying to reach the finish line before everyone else. This isn’t to prove anything to anyone. I’m just trying to find peace, and for that I want to get rid of all the clutter in my life. The biggest form of clutter I see right now is my own body fat, and getting rid of it using the right ways will make me agile, active and fresh.

If you have faced failure out there or are struggling with weight loss, please read this entire article very carefully again. Your mind is your enemy, and destroying your tendency to binge and remaking new brain tendencies to lead a clean eating life, is going to take some time. Overcoming your temptations is going to take some time. Getting your life back on track IS GOING TO TAKE SOME TIME. Accept this fact and move on. Don’t be in a hurry to achieve results. Clean eat as if its a chore. Workout as if its a chore. Soon you will start to feel good and want to do it. Until then be patient with yourself. Don’t be so hard. Be kind on your body. Give it the nutrition it needs, don’t deprive it. Make sure you have enough to rebuild after you have burned off.

I hope you guys keep reading this and keep working at it. Peace.

Where many people go wrong with Weight Loss

I’ve been battling weight problems all my life. Yesterday was my sister’s birthday and I had gone to meet her at a McDonald’s. I went in with the intention of giving her a gift and catching up, because we hadn’t met in a long time. Instead, I found myself waiting for her as I glanced on every single thing I had avoided for these two weeks. Burgers, fries, wraps.

FYI, McDonald’s is really not the place to go to if you’re trying to escape the binge.

Anywho my eyes fell on the coffee section and I thought about this YouTube video that said black coffee is great for suppressing appetite. I rushed over and got one to see if it was true.

Sure enough, it tasted like horse piss, so the lingering after taste annihilated any cravings I might have had.

An hour later I found myself chatting up with my sister, holding on to the coffee for dear life. She asked me what I wanted and I told her nothing because…

She didn’t even let me finish speaking and started telling me how I always do this. I keep ‘dieting’ to lose weight and end up having double the amount later. She even warned me not to be anorexic. I had no idea how to convince her that I wasn’t really eliminating anything, rather just substituting stuff. When you have failed an ample number of times, people usually don’t believe you.

“Bullshit! You should just eat everything and workout twice as much” she said as she ordered a box of chicken nuggets which I finally accepted to have at her insistence.

That doesn’t really make any sense. As many trainers have stressed before me, it’s not really about calorie count. It’s all about what foods you eat. Quality trumps quantity and automatically ensures calorie count. I had seen this guy once explain it to me in the best way possible, so I’m going to give it a shot.

Let’s assume you have a Snickers bar. You haven’t eaten lunch so you think a Snickers bar is okay to have. 100 gms of Snickers is about 500 calories. So ideally, it should give you enough energy right?

Well, yeah it should, but dieting isn’t really about just keeping your calorie count at bay. Think about it. Snickers has 24gms of fat for every 100gms. That is about a fourth of the entire mass. Picture that fat. That’s the amount of fat that I lost after a three days of working out. It’s not easy to burn off fat.

Now let me just put this in perspective. If you were to have 2 medium sized potatoes (mashed or whatever), about a 100 gms of brown rice, 100 gms of chicken breast and a cup of tomatoes, the calorie count would come at 434, so let’s put in a medium sized orange there and NOW we’re looking at 500 calories. Ideally, if you were an organism that had a computer in your stomach that could figure out the exact calorie count of what you just put in, the first meal of one Snickers bar would fill your stomach.

Real life is very different. Your stomach has no way of knowing the exact calorie count of what you put in until it is broken down into those calories, which is why there is this neat little system where you only stop feeling hungry when your stomach is convinced that the VOLUME of food is enough. Our ancestors had the most straightforward and simple food where the volume was in ration with the calorie count. With the food processing industry, a thousand calories are pumped into a small snack just to enhance taste.

Having that snickers bar is not going to make you feel full. Your stomach is going to send over a ‘I’m hungry feed me properly’ signal in a matter of minutes. the second meal however, will make you feel full and satisfied, and THAT’S what substitution is all about. It’s about quality and quantity.

Coming back, I did have the nuggets (288 cals of pure fat and cardboard chicken) and ultimately left. I went home and had a proper meal of brown rice, tomatoes, an orange and some buttermilk (home made). I should mention at this point that when I bit into that piece of nugget, I had a very strong and overpowering feeling to buy an entire meal. My brain was pounding away saying ‘COME ON!! ONE LAST DAY!! YOU’VE ALREADY LOST WEIGHT HAVEN’T YOU? WHAT’S WITH ONE BURGER??” I didn’t suppress that emotion nor did I go and have a meal. I just enjoyed the nuggets to the fullest extent and went home from there. I’m starting to have my binge under control.

This morning I worked out for about 2 hours. I’m not even doing it for the weight loss anymore. I’m not even doing it for the muscles. I just love the feeling of the afterburn that comes. You feel great and tired and fresh. You feel like killing someone and kissing them at the same time. You want to go to sleep but you want to get up and do something else. It’s a mixed bag but the overall feeling is of achievement. Working out is a great feeling. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.

As of now my goal is still to get down to about 15% body fat. And most of all it is to stop bingeing.