Mental Strength

If you want muscles, strength, and endurance you must workout. You must work the muscles frequently and for a set period of time if you want the body to take shape. You may not be able to see the muscle or fitness if it's overshadowed by too much fat, but the muscle will grow and will be seen once the fat is lost. Even if you cannot see your efforts, you can breath, climb, and move easier than when you don't workout at all. Depending on how hard you workout and how long you workout your body can achieve amazing results. Those results may be long lasting or short lived, and will be determined by your mental state of mind. 

Mental Strength is not developed in the same way as physical strength.

Running yourself ragged into the ground with a million errands, chores, and the endless shitload of responsibilities for family, friends, and colleagues makes the body fatigued. If the body is tired it will not have enough energy to endure consistency or focus. It will also be too exhausted to make good nutritional choices. 

At this pace, a person may last a short period of time being able to achieve all these tasks and still be able to eat well and workout regularly, but it will end in one way or another. 
Either the body will continue on this road and develop some obsessive compulsive traits, a short temper, or other mental deficiency, or the body will shut down and stop all this crazy making activity. You may end up feeling sabotaged by your efforts achieving only failure -perhaps once more. 

Many will think that the failure came from not knowing which exercises to do, how long to exercise, or what to eat or perhaps a complete loss on how to achieve any of this at all. Most will seek external confirmation by going to a weight loss clinic of some sort,  or seek advise from a friend who said the results came by way of what you already knew and did, but somehow everything got confused in your mind, and that confusion ended up in frustration or depression and failure. 

Realize that the body is not designed to take that much stress if you don't know how to manage it all. People who are able to take on a vast amount of work and be accomplished are not made overnight. They have been trained well over time from when they were a child or they eventually got the magic key later on in life of how to do it all, but have been well practiced, that it seemed to everybody else, that it came naturally. 

Mental strength is gathered from the calm, the quiet, and the peace purposely carved out of each day. If the day is full of running around and being bothered by one person or another, there has to be a purposeful attempt to shut it all down, so that you may gather the strength you need to endure the demands a sound nutrition and exercise program will require. 

...This topic is loaded with so much to say that I will continue on another day.


"When all else fails, do nothing"

RsmKettleGirl

Is Diet or Exercise More Important?

Obviously both exercise and diet are important if the goal is to transform the body. But there are times when diet is more important than exercise and vise verse.

Tonight was a great example of a time when diet was more important than exercise. My husband and I went to an amazing dinner party where the dinner and desserts were rich and delicious looking, but I didn't take a bite. I wouldn't, because eating foods outside my diet would really set me back. It's easy to show a net gain of 2 lbs on the scale the next morning and have to take a week to get back on track. However, not working out tonight would be less of an issue, because I work out enough during the week. I can always workout throughout the weekend to make sure I get in 6 days / week of workouts.

Ultimately if the goal is to simply lose weight either one must cut back on the calorie intake or start exercising if one has not been doing so. But a person wouldn't be able to eat more and exercise if a loss of weight is the goal. If a person simply drops the calories, the body will surely lose weight, but the body will not be toned, and if one is heavy enough, the skin will most likely droop in places on the body. If one works out with resistance weights, then the skin has an opportunity to shrink and potentially not sag.

Years ago, a friend of the family lost over 100 lbs with dieting alone, no exercise. Her body was smaller, looked better in clothes, but her skin was very droopy. Yet, if you pick up an Oxygen fitness magazine and see the before and after shots of people losing a large amount of weight, the skin either doesn't sag or not  a lot, because they do resistance and cardio training as well as diet.

So, in different ways exercise is important because it speeds up the metabolism, allows the body to burn calories longer throughout the day, and can reduce the skin from sagging after losing a lot of weight. (This is another reason why kettlebell is a very good exercise. It not only increases your metabolism, but also provides an excellent resistant form of exercise).

On the other hand, diet is critical to losing weight faster, and if the diet mostly consists of lean meats, good fats, leafy and root vegetables ....the transformation may be more impressive than just lowering the overall calorie intake.

What I ate today:
830am: same smoothie as usual
11am: pear and hard boiled egg
1pm: salsa, 1/2 sweet potato, 4 oz chicken strips from Costco
3pm: 1 Promax chocolate chip bar
5:30pm: salsa, 1/2 sweet potato, 4 oz chicken strips from Costco. I ate this meal in the car on the way to pick  up my daughter from the gym. 6:30pm was the dinner party I attended.

No Workout tonight.

It wasn't so hard staying away from all the delicious food at the party tonight. The difficult part is going home thinking that this is just one of 90+ days I will be doing this....

I am not driving myself nuts being so strict. I think the challenge of seeing how far I can push myself, and deal with tension is just so fascinating. The reward is that I've conquered just one more obstacle or got that much better than ever did before.

RsmKettleGirl@gmail.com