Metrics

 I am the type of person who seeks out progress in all ways in my life (as many of us would).  Our kids are growing up happy and healthy, check.  Our paychecks get bigger each year, check.  The same goes with my personal physical fitness goals.  I want to see progress and since I see myself every single day, it is hard to visibly notice over an extended period of time.  This is why I need data and metrics to pull from. This need had me going down a path of discovery to find some early data when I first got started and I finally found it.  It was a simple body scan I did at Complete Nutrition and the initial results were not good.  I was coming in at 218 lbs and 28% body fat in October 2016.  That was eye opening that just a mere 5% away from being 1/3 body fat.  I considered myself an athlete and this hurt.  It hurt mostly my ego but gave me the kick in the ass I needed.  After a year, I have new metrics to report.  I am now at 198 lbs and at 16.5% body fat.  In doing the math, I have dropped 11.5% body fat (28.4 lbs of fat) and put on around 8-9 lbs of muscle as of October 2017. This is the kind of data I love to see.  It really puts into perspective what I have done in the last year and makes it worth the money, time, pain and fun I put into getting here.  In the summer of 2017, I had actually been down to my lowest adult weight at 188.8.  This was a great thing to see but did not understand what my body was made up of.  What was my BF%, what did my internal metrics look like (glucose, cholesterol, etc.).  Now that I have the internal blood work done, I have the next thing I can focus on.  Ideally, I wish I would have done that first but better late than never.

-N

Finding your "Why"

Now is as good a time as any to bring this topic up as I am finding it tough to get back into the swing of things.  
Identifying your "why" can make a big impact on how you approach your daily activities whether they are pleasant or not.  It provides a reasoning and understanding of what drives all of us.  For some, it could be to be more active in our children's lives, for others it could be to improve your daily attitude.  And this isn't just for working out.  Your "why" drives each of us to pursue that in which makes us feel good about ourselves and what we have accomplished.  Your why can be different too for different activities.  I'll use myself as an example.  I truly enjoy helping people and making their day better.  This is a major reason why I love a job that most people would think that the job has "a face only a mother could love".  When it comes to working out, I tell myself (as mentioned in my previous post) that the feeling of starting my day off with a workout is so much better than the additional time in bed.  When I feel better about myself, I am more productive at work and feel like I have more energy at the end of the day to keep up with kiddo.  
I feel having this identified can be the difference between faking it and making it.  A lot of people can crash diet and have short term weight loss or "success" but that waivers over time.  Finding what motivates you and drives you each day to be better is going to be that push you need to get out of bed early or stay up late or push yourself beyond what you thought you were capable of.  Once you have identified that, I feel everyone can make steps towards long term success.

-N