Good and Fit Fast

I gained three pounds over the weekend, so not the most auspicious start to the weight-loss program. I’m still eating holiday treats because I can’t throw food away. I have gone for a walk every day, which isn’t the most strenuous activity, but I’m glad to be doing it and hope to keep it up: even the tiniest hill takes my breath away in the state I’m in. You can see pictures from my daily walks here on Instagram.

I’m taking an interesting course from the University of Michigan via Coursera called “Beyond the Sustainable Development Goals” and I just watched a heartbreaking video about the Zero Hunger program started by the Brazilian goverment in 2003. It’s such a gross feeling knowing that I consume more calories than I need to every day while people are dying of starvation all over the world.

I have been inspired by other blogs about getting out of debt and losing weight, and had hoped that this blog could both be an inspiration to others and help me stay on track with those goals. But I feel like I will need to keep track of lots of boring stats and daily activities in order to measure progress, which is less fun than spending 5 minutes before bed on what is basically a diary entry every night. But perfect is the enemy of good, I tell myself, and now I’m just hoping to get into the practice of posting each day. Soon the site will look nice and be filled with practical advice about how to change, so people who are feeling really low can come and hope.

This morning I got up and spent 35 minutes on the rowing machine while listening to an episode of Mike Vardy’s Podcast, the Productivityist. He was interviewing motivational speaker and self-development author Brian Tracy, who spoke a lot about the importance of time management, but also about how he believes the subconscious mind and superconscious mind work. Brian Tracy is a very successful man, and he clearly believes channeling the superconscious mind has helped him throughout his life. 

He believes if you have a goal, and formulate it as a clear, authoritative command, your conscious mind will feed that to your subconscious mind, who will feed it to your superconscious mind, and then the universe will work to make that happen. (You can see him speak on this topic here.) I think it’s a lovely idea, but what about all of the people living in poverty and despair? Are they living that way because they don’t know enough to formulate their goals and desires as authoratative commands and feed those into their superconscious minds?

To be fair, Brian also points out that you have to commit to your goals and take action to make them happen. And you have to confidently believe they will happen. Visualizing helps too: picture how your life will be and what you want and work to make it so.

This is all a bit too woo-woo for me, but I still found it fascinating. Just in case:

• I am healthy and fit, without a food or sugar addiction, and I weigh 143 pounds.
• I am a successful fiction writer, happy and earning a good living doing it, helping others who need help get started in this line of work.

P.S.: I’m not in prison, I haven’t been fired from my job, and my husband hasn’t left me for someone else so I suddenly have more time on my hands. (Okay?) Thanks!

That’s not really what this blog is about, but that would be a nice side effect. I am hoping I can change my behavior so I can change things in my life that I wish were different, and I am hoping trying to keep a blog about these things will somehow help me with the accountability part. The main things I am hoping to change in 2021 are:

1. Get out of debt (Good) 
2. Get fit
3. Learn to be a better writer

I have been wanting to change these three things for decades, so I am doubtful that just starting a blog will help, but it’s something I haven’t tried yet. Fingers crossed!

Stats for measurement:
• I would like to lose 105 pounds
• Pay off all of my debt (I’ll have to come back to you on the exact figure)
• I would like to write here everyday, and have 2 pieces of fiction published.