Tag: Fitness

Blog: Decisions in Life

A little while back, I swallowed some of my biases and checked out Tony Robbins’s documentary on Netflix, I Am Not Your Guru (trailer here).  I had prejudged him as something in between a vacuous motivational speaker and a charlatan.  I of course based this opinion on nothing and admit that it was incredibly closed-minded of me.

I quite enjoyed the documentary, and I felt that I was captivated by his charisma.  While I know a lot of the business involves crafting a certain persona and message, and that the documentary is edited to create a particular narrative, it softened me to him and I wanted to check out some of his other works.  I’m not interested in investing the money to attend his events (I’m not *THAT* open-minded), but I thought I’d give one of his books a shot.  He also recently appeared in a podcast episode with Tim Ferriss, whom I’ve started to trust as something of an authority figure.  Anything that Tim Ferriss says, I’m willing to listen to.

So, I checked out Awaken The Giant Within, by Tony Robbins.

There was a really cool perspective he shared that has stuck with me since hearing it.  Explained the etymological origin of “decision” or “to decide.”  Without getting technical, it splits the word into “de” and “cision” or “away” and “to cut,” or in essence, “to cut away.”

Ok, that doesn’t sound very insightful.  But then he framed it in terms of what a proper decision entails.  He notes that when we talk about “making decisions” in our lives, we often are speaking as if we are expressing wishes.  To him, people “decide” to lose weight all the time, but never follow through on the execution.  In other words, when someone says they’ve decided to exercise and lose weight, until they follow through on that action, all they are saying is “I wish to exercise and lose weight.”

To make it a proper decision, you have to essentially make a cut and discard every other alternative.  When you decide something, you are firmly choosing not to entertain any other alternatives, and you are committing to that course of action.  To decide is to cut off those alternatives.

Framing it that way made a lot of sense to me.  It’s a criticism of myself that I’ve heard flavours of for some time, and it’s something I try to be mindful of.  This past year I’ve been reading books and reflecting on myself in order to live more intentionally.  I’ve had a few decision points so far that are opening up interesting futures to me.  Right now, I’m looking at career moves; should I continue to become a paramedic, or should I commit more fully to teaching.  I don’t have an answer to that questions yet.  It’s still really early in the process and I’m fine to live with that ambiguity for now.  I have plenty of time yet to explore my options.

There are other areas where making decisions has become important.  For the sake of being cryptic, I cannot divulge them at the moment and I apologize for that.  I’ve had a decision weighing over me recently that I finally pulled the trigger on.  But there are other “decisions” that are manifesting themselves as “wishes” and I’m not forgetting about them (I’m looking at you, exercise!).  I still haven’t followed through on committing to exercise, so for now that’s is my personal shame I carry around.

What I’m starting to wrestle with is how to take ownership of deciding my life’s course and what it means to be a person of character and commitment.  It’s not a strength of mine historically, but it’s a virtue I seek to cultivate moving forward.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

Fitness Progress Update

For all of my academic strengths, I knew the biggest hurdle I’d face if I wanted to become a paramedic is to get my health and fitness in line with the demands of the job.  To my knowledge, I have no medical issues that create real obstacles to hold me back other than my formerly broken ankle.  I have always been on the bigger side of life, but with exception to 3 instances, it has never prevented me from participating or completing anything in life.

As anyone can imagine, the job of a paramedic requires a certain level of fitness to both be effective and to safely carry out the job.  I knew that, if I want to be a medic, I would need to lose weight and to increase my general fitness (strength, cardiovascular, flexibility, and mobility).  I’ve been making steady progress, and have managed to reliably keep weight off.  However, this progress has not been without it’s lost ground as I try to forge ahead.

The problem with exercise and diet is that my long history with food means the habits I have ingrained are hard to break, so when my exercise and diet systems break down, it’s easy for me to undermine my progress.  Case in point: my trip to Scotland.

I had originally set a goal for myself: by the time I would take my trip to Scotland, I would be 275lbs.  This is 50lbs down from my heaviest recorded weight and would really signal progress on my path.  In the weeks leading up to Scotland, a number of priorities and events stressed broke my systems.  I stopped going to the gym, I was forced to cut back on grocery expenditures, and I was making poor eating choices.  My last recorded weigh-in before Scotland:

Jul 10th – 296lbs

Not bad, but fairly off my target.  Still, it was 30lbs down from my starting weight, and I was proud of that accomplishment.

There were two thoughts in the back of my mind regarding the Scotland trip: first, I would not be eating particularly healthy while I was travelling, so that would count against me; and second, I would be walking around more, so it should off-set some of my bad habits while I indulged on the trip.  Turns out, the former was true, but the latter was mistaken.  We spent a fair amount of time driving, which meant I was running substantial caloric surpluses.  The result?  My first weigh-in after my trip:

Aug 3 – 311lbs

Yikes!  I wiped out 15lbs of progress!  Granted, I know this is the result of a lot of factors, like water weight, that’s not just body weight, however it was still disheartening to see on the scale.

It has been over two weeks since I’ve come home from the trip and I still have not returned to the gym.  The system has ground to a halt.  This is not to say I’ve completely fallen off the wagon, though.  With re-establishing some of my diet systems, that 311lbs has dropped a bit, and I’m hovering around 305lbs, which is progress.

This process is certainly something that has helped me learn more about myself and how important systems are to my goals.  I can’t simply rely on hoping I make good choices in the moment, because so many competing interests are at play.  This has also re-affirmed that the gym is not as high of a priority for me as I had hoped, since it’s the first thing that gets jettisoned when my workload is overburdened (keep in mind, prior to Scotland, I was working a full time job, a part time job, two major volunteer committee commitments, sorting out personal things in my life, sustaining a long-distance relationship, podcasting, trip planning, and taking a distance education course).  These are not excuses, but reasons why I failed to hit my target.  Autopsying the wreckage will hopefully give me some insight on how I can do better next time.

In a future post, I’ll discuss what I’ve learned from health and trying to set up self-sustaining systems, but in the meantime, I need to get those systems back on track!

Stay Awesome,

Ryan