As I was fighting back from the weekend of food debauchery, it occurred to me that I could really use a training montage. You know, like in the movies, where the plucky hero/ine suffers some adversity and has to fight back and train harder than they've ever trained before, except to a rocking soundtrack and quick edits? And it all just takes 5 minutes or so - - a training montage would save me so much time...!
Wouldn't that make this whole workout thing a lot easier? Weeks, months, or even years of gradually improving fitness condensed into a tight 5 minute package with suitably motivating music and a great beat. "Eye of the Tiger", or the Matrix "Lobby Fight Scene" music, perhaps.
In the training montage, the only indication of the passage of time is the fact that the plucky hero/ine can do something at the end of the montage that they could not do at the outset, be it running up the steps of the museum, or doing a one-handed pushup, or running a 4 minute mile, or punching through a piece of wood from 2 inches away (all of which are on my bucket list, by the way).
Sadly, though, we get no training montages in real life. Weeks, months and years of time passing can be condensed into ... well, weeks, months and years. There are no short cuts, or quick edits to make this lifestyle change go faster. Although you can choose a rocking soundtrack for your workouts, you still have to do the workouts.
So I do the workouts.
It took me until Thursday of this week - - 4 days of rigorously healthy eating habits, daily exercise, and extra glasses of water each day - - to even get close to last week's weigh in numbers, and by Friday, I was a pitiful 0.1 pounds down - - essentially flat versus the previous week.
So I kept on track on Friday rather than giving in and splurging with a treat day. I added an extra workout in the evening and kept up the increased water consumption so that this morning I was a further 0.9 pounds down, for a 1 pound loss on the week to 227.4 pounds, for 106.5 down in total. It was hard fought, I'll tell you, but that almost makes it sweeter. I didn't give in to my frustration at my ballooning weight, and stuck to my plan like the stubborn so and so that I am, and it paid off.
I weigh myself every morning on my digital scale, which also measures (directionally, at least), my body fat percentage. When I first started working out my body fat percentage was more than 50%. Distressingly more than 50%. Considering that a healthy body fat percentage for a woman my age is in the range of 23%-35%, and you can see that my body fat percentage was juuuuusssssttt a little bit high. "Well marbled" is another way of putting it.
Well, this week I began to string together consistent body fat readings under 40%. Sure, 39% is still too much fat, but the number is coming down thanks to the training montage - er - the consistent attention to diet and daily exercise. Yet another metric to check off as improving!
And it's another week closer to my goals:
I have no plans for any food debauchery this weekend, so hopefully this coming week will not be so difficult to work through. It will be week 2 of the higher weight (8 lb) free weights, and week 2 of the higher weight (2 lbs each) wrist/ankle weights, but last week's workouts went well, so I think the workouts will go pretty smoothly this week.
In the meantime, as Rocky said: "... it ain’t about how hard you hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward; how much you can take and keep moving forward". I'll keep moving forward.
You are great!
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