Fitness Passion?!?

Week 2 - Find Your Fitness Passion

Fitness and Passion do NOT go together in my book!  As mentioned in the previous post, I do not like to exercise.  I see it as a necessary evil.  But I am trying to change the way I think about exercise.  Everywhere you look, it talks about how important it is.  Plus, I really don't want to be a fat old lady who has difficulty walking.  I want to be a spry young thing when I am 80!  Gotta get working on it now!

I took the "8 Colors of Fitness" quiz on Wellness with Kate's blog and found out that I am "True Blue - Tried and True."  That sound about right to me.  I like to walk and I would love to try yoga!  I got a Fit Bit for my birthday last year and love it when it dweedles and blinks to let me know that I hit my daily step goal.  (I am slowly working my way up to 10,000 steps, which it came pre-programmed to measure.)

I just have to remember this information and not get discouraged that I haven't seen any changes yet.

Just have to remember to:

Keep Going!

Now, I want to find a yoga class and give that a try!

As always,

Become a Self-Help Junkie!

Let's have a Reading Challenge for anyone who wants to be a Self-Help Junkie!

I want to improve myself in 2016 and can't read ALL of the books out there!  What a perfect way to get Cliff Notes on Self-Help books!

I know that self-help books can be rather daunting or just plain boring.  But there is a Revolution!  Authors want their books read, so they are making these books more readable.

Here are the Levels:

Poser 1-2 Books.  You must be close to perfect! No need for deep searching.
Seeker 3-5 Books.  You are looking for something, but not quite sure what yet.
Hacker 6-9 Books.  You think that you should be changing, and trying to figure out how to hack your life.
Addict 10-14 Books.  You are committed to change, constantly searching, and looking for ways to implement the information into various aspects of your life.
Guru 15+ Books.  You have read so many books, you could start writing your own!

Just a few rules:

1.  This Challenge runs from January 1, 2016 to December 31, 2016.  You cannot start the book until January 1st, and the last page needs to be read by Dec. 31st.
2.  You can join at anytime.  Crossovers are welcome, too!
3.  As long as the book has a category of Self-Help or Self-Improvement.  The books can also deal with Nutrition, Diet, Wellness, Health, Exercise, Mind, Body, Change, Spirituality, Learning a New Skill - just to name a few...
3.  Format doesn't matter.  Listening to an audiobook while doing your daily walk or commute is perfect!
4. You must write a review and post a link to the review in the comments below.
5. Be kind and read others' reviews - and leave a positive note.

Let's do this!

Goal Setting

Week 1 of 2015 - Ready, Set, Goals!

Okay - this one has taken me a little bit of time to work on.  I have always wanted to set goals for myself, but I seem to get discouraged time and again, because I never seem to achieve them.  However, it looks like Wellness with Kate gave me a few tips that will help me this time!

photo credit

I loved hearing this: A realistic weight loss goal is 10% of your current weight in 6 months. 

So, that is my goal for the first 6 months of this year.  That means that I can realistically lose 17.5 pounds in 6 months.  That is an average of 3 pounds a month.  That sounds totally doable!

How am I going to get there?  Well, I am going with the What? How Much? When? and How Often? model. 

So my overall goal is to lose 17.5 pounds by my birthday in June.  Wow, won't that be a nice present to myself!

So... HOW am I going to get there? To be completely honest with myself here, I am a slug!  At least I am not a couch potato!  I really don't do any exercise.  I have already started on this because I set up a mini goal of getting into the habit of exercise!

What? FitStar Daily Dose and their January Challenge.

I heard about their January Challenge in an email.  It is to do 20 workouts in the month of January.  

How Much?  10 minutes.  The wonderful thing about FitStar is that you can do something called the Daily Dose.  There is a focus for each time you log in and the workouts are only 9-13 minutes long.  Boy, are they a long 10 minutes!  The focus usually goes something like this: Abs and Arms, then Back, Core and Legs, and keeps going back and forth between upper body and lower body.  I am so thankful that today is my rest day because my underused muscles have been screaming!

When? First thing in the morning!  If I wait until later in the day, when I get home from work, there is a less likely chance that I will actually do it!

How Often? 6 days a week! I started the challenge late (on the 5th) so I don't have a lot of wiggle room, if I want to be able to do 20 workouts this month!

I will also be slowly adding in walks to this month.
  

I want to walk for 2 miles after work for at least 3 days a week. 

Sounds like another Action Plan I just made!  WooHoo!  This is fun and easy...Now I have to put this plan into ACTION!

I will be checking in next week to see how I am doing with this Action Plan!

I'm so Excited!

...and I just can't Hide it!

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So... I plan on focusing on something different each week.  Every month will have four different topics such as Nutrition, Self-Love, Movement and Balance.  Plus, each month, I will be reading (at least) one self-help book that deals with these different subjects as well.

I will be journaling about my experience here, so I hope that you will join me!  These 52 Simple Changes will be written in conjunction with Wellness with Kate's Realistic Health Coaching.

I look forward to progressing through this year of 2016 with Excitement, and trepidation!  How will the year end?  Will I be able to reach any of my goals?  What can I expect as a result of these changes?

Join me on this journey!  I hope to see some cheerleaders to keep me motivated!

Reading Challenge Wrap-Up

Well - 2016 started yesterday and I finally came back to this blog - since words like Intentions and Resolutions were in the air!

I saw that I had a reading challenge created and I wanted to read 12+ books.

Didn't quite make it.  Oh well!

Let's try again.  I had a great list, and it kind of fell by the wayside.

However - I did achieve Hacker status!  I read nine books.  

Here they are! 

Books I read:
Fire Starter Sessions by Danielle la Porte
Love yourself like your life depended on it by Kamal Ravikant
Tapping for Weight Loss by Jessica Ortner
Heal Your Body by Louise Hay
Stand up for your life by Cheryl Richardson
Happier at Home by Gretchen Rubin
The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo
50 Ways to Soothe Yourself without Food by Susan Albers
59 Seconds: Think a little, Change a lot by Richard Wiseman

Run-down on this list?!

Fire Starter Sessions - good but if you have heard Danielle la Porte speak - this book sounds like one of her lectures.  A few good ideas

Love Yourself like Your Life Depended on it - a letter by a guy who was in the dumps and decided to love himself and everything became peachy - and I didn't get much from it.

Tapping for Weight Loss was good - but I never put anything into practice.

Heal Your Body was a LIST of what's wrong with you - why that might be (on a metaphysical level) and an Affirmation to get past it.

Stand Up for Your Life - by far my favorite of last year.  So many things in it that rang true and so many things I want to follow up on!  As I was reading it, I wondered if Danielle la Porte was a Cheryl Richardson disciple - or just made what Cheryl wrote a little more trendy?

Happier at Home - made me feel like my life wasn't so bad as Gretchen's and that I did many of these things already - and the ones I didn't do already, weren't something I would do.

The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up - big take-away from this book:  Get rid of things that don't bring you joy and only buy things that bring you joy.  I enjoyed grabbing everything of one kind and putting it into a huge pile and sorting.  Got rid of a LOT of clothes with this method.  I didn't, however, fold my t-shirts in a certain way so that they sing.

50 Ways to Soothe Yourself without Food - split into different categories with great tips on how to get through sh*t without turning to food. It was a library book - and I want to own it as a reference tool

59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot - neat concept for a book. A psychologist(?!) was asked by a niece to explain a self-help technique in under a minute.  So this book is taking different studies and areas of self-help and condensed it down to a 1 minute sound bite. Some good take-aways from this one.

Will run and do this challenge again this year.  Let's see what happens this year!

As always,

Intention versus Resolution

Every morning is a fresh beginning. Every day is the world made new. Today is a new day. Today is my world made new. I have lived all my life up to this moment, to come to this day. This moment--this day--is as good as any moment in all eternity. I shall make of this day--each moment of this day--a heaven on earth. This is my day of opportunity.--Dan Custer