David Hollingworth

Yep it’s that time of the week again, Monday morning.

Time for some reflection on the weekend. Hands up those of us who get stressed at the weekend. Am I the only one?

Weekends are supposed to be for relaxing and shedding the stress of the previous week. This weekend has been anything but relaxing for me. I’m not going to go into the details of what went on; nothing out of the ordinary really. What is important is what happened to me.

At first I found myself getting what I thought was depressed; but when I looked again I found that it wasn’t depression it was anger I was feeling. I wasn’t angry at the people around me, though my daughter did press a few buttons for me from time to time; it was more anger directed at myself.

So Monday morning this week is a time for reflection. A time to ask myself, “Why was all this anger directed inwards? What was it trying to accomplish and what was its root?”.

Needless to say I’m nice and relaxed this morning.

Once you have set a goal you need a path to take you to it. This is where your task lists and your ‘trusted system’ come into play.

Without some tasks, some actions, we’ll never get to our goals. Goals don’t accomplish themselves. So for my cycling goal I have the following tasks:

1. Get the bike out of the back of the shed.
2. Service the bike.
3. Find my riding gear (or buy new stuff).
4. Devise a suitable route that’s going to give me my target 30 miles a week. This is probably 3 x 10 miles or maybe 2 x 15 miles.
5. Start building up the mileage.

How will I ensure that these tasks get done? Put them into my trusted system. The ‘trusted system’ is whatever methodology you choose for managing your goals and your tasks provided you trust it completely. If you don’t trust it to give you the tasks as and when you need them it will never work for you; but will work against you instead. More about trusted systems and how I work mine in a later posting.

I know I’m not going to be able to get on my bike and just cycle 30 miles. In fact I’ll be lucky if I can cycle 300 yards (metres); but I know that if I can get to point 5 then the battle is half won. The other half is making it a habit.

Having posted earlier saying I was not going to go on a diet as part of my weight loss program (can I call it a program?) Leo over on Zen habits has posted up today his Top 15 Diet Hacks.

These aren’t a “diet”; but instead are tips for adjusting the diet to make it more healthy and his number one tip is; “Don’t Diet”.

Looking down the list there’s a lot of his tips that are already part of my life style like:

• avoiding too much saturated fats,
• eating brown foods (bread and pasta),
• cutting down on meat - we only eat red meat once or twice a week and one or two meals a week will be meat free.

One area I could improve on is my junk food intake. I still eat too many crisps and the like, particularly in front of the telly last thing at night. Another thing I find very hard to cut down on is cheese. I know I said I avoid too many saturated fats; but I love cheese and frequently have it in my sandwiches at lunch time. That will be a tough one to give up.

Overall I don’t think my diet is too bad; I must get the exercise level up!

In my post How To Set A SMART Goal I described what SMART goals were and why they were important. I also set myself the goal of loosing 23lbs by Christmas this year!

After setting a goal, any sort; short, medium, long term the most important thing is to take some action. No goal is ever going to be achieve unless some action is taken; but how do we decide what action to take and when to take it? In this post I want to go through the steps I propose to take to achieve my goal.

Right, I have to loose weight, what are my options?

• Go on a diet. I won’t do this unless directed to by a medical professional because I don’t believe they’re the right way to go about loosing weight. I believe that if I diet I will reduce my carb. or fat intake, my body metabolism will slow as a result and if I slip off the diet the weight will just pile back on because my metabolism is slower.
• Cut out unnecessary junk food. This is dieting in a way I guess; but it’s more of an adjustment to my diet than an actual diet. I can do this by eating healthier, fewer sweets & biscuits and more fruit.
• Exercise. Oh dear, I knew I’d get to this one eventually.

Stop the list there, let’s talk about exercise. I’ve already said I’m not going to starve myself and only make modest changes to my diet so realistically the only way (weigh) I’m going to achieve this goal is to exercise.

I’ve already set myself a walking goal; but to be honest that is ramping up only slowly and I don’t think it’s going have a huge impact on my weight loss goal in the short, or even medium, term. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a contributor to this goal; but I’m going to need something more.

What else might I do?

• Swimming? I can’t swim, tried to learn about 10 years ago. We won’t go there.
• Running? Look, I’m having enough difficulty walking. Let’s walk before we run, please.
• Cycling? Ah, this is a distinct possibility. In my thirties I was a reasonably keen cyclist, nothing excessive; but I could manage 60 miles. The point is, I was fit.

So it looks like cycling is my best bet. I have a bike and cycling is good aerobic exercise. I feel another goal coming on:

• Specific - I will cycle 30 miles a week.
• Measurable - I’ve a trip meter on the bike
• Attainable - I feel 30 miles a week is within my grasp; but I may have to sacrifice something to fit it in.
• Relevant - Yes, this will contribute to my weight loss.
• Timely - By the end of June!

So I’ve a second exercise goal to help me loose that weight. Over the next two months I should be able to judge whether or not the pounds are starting to come off or whether I need to step up the exercise program. Until then I will work on integrating exercise into my life, something I’ve not done for many years now.

One of the most difficult things for me to do is to take a break from the keyboard. When I’m in the zone I just want to keep typing; but over the years this has had a detrimental affect on my neck and shoulders.

I even had a little message pop-up occasionally to remind me, “Every hour take a 15 minute break.”.

Did this work? Did it heck!

Then I came across Workrave. This little program is designed so that I have to take a break when it tells me to. It’s very flexible and can be set up so that:

• You periodically take micro-breaks of a short duration.
• Less frequently you have to take a longer break where you do some stretches or take a walk around.
• It will even limit the total amount of time you can spend on the computer each day.

So now I have a set up where:

• Every 8 minutes I have to stop using the keyboard for 30 seconds. This is a micro-break.
• Every 45 minutes I have to take a 10 minute rest break.

Because my day is very open ended at the moment I have switched off the ‘total time allowed each day’ facility.

When the break time arrives you get a audio and visual (pop-up window) reminder. If you ignore these then the pop-up starts to flash, first orange then red. However there’s no escaping your break because if you continue typing Workrave will add on the extra seconds you need to complete your stoppage.

The rest breaks advises you to get up from the computer and do something else. It will even pop-up a series of exercises to perform to help relieve fatigue and muscle stress.

You can, it you choose, postpone or even skip a break if you simply must; but then that rather defeats the purpose of running Workrave. I’ve been using it for less than a week and I can already feel my shoulders are less tense.

Oops time for a micro-break….