One day at the gym my trainer told me that my shoelace is “of a fat person’s shoe”. I was like “EXCUSE ME? I just lost 2 kilos the other day, so try to motivate me here.”
When he explained his rationale, it actually was motivating. If you have a lot of fat on your body, you’re more likely to have to sit down and bring your feet up to tie your shoelaces. Because of that position, usually a fat person’s shoelace will lean slightly to the right or left side of his shoes. On the other hand, most fit people tend to either bend down to tie their shoes or bring their entire leg up to tie them – that’s when the shoelace is located exactly in the middle.
Whether you have only one kilo to lose or as many as I did, you need to do something about it. I’m not trying to convince you to start dieting and lose weight – not at all. What I want you to have is consciousness. It is crucial to be able to determine exactly where you are, and whether or not you’re heading the right direction with your current eating habits.
For me personally, I was going nowhere at the time. I had been obese my entire life and have always struggled when trying to lose weight. It was when I started working on myself and started looking at things differently when real change happened.
Being conscious is crucial. You must acknowledge that you do in fact have a fat shoelace, that you can no longer fit in those jeans from couple of years ago or that you can’t fit easily in most coupe cars or tiny chairs (like me when I was huge). It’s about acknowledging reality of your body and how you perceive yourself. It’s fine if you have some extra kilos, it’s fine when you decide it’s okay. For me, it’s much better to have those extra kilos and know about them than to lose them for the sake of something or someone else (i.e. an upcoming event or because your boyfriend asked you to lose some weight). This is definitely not consistent nor sustainable in the longterm. You are the one who needs to decide what you want and how to get there.
For me, nothing was more painful than thinking about going to the gym. But this had nothing to do with the expense of paying for a gym membership. I know so many people who wouldn’t consider canceling their gym membership and they aren’t even using it. Maybe they will go once every couple of weeks and only for a very short visit because their iPod isn’t fully charged. Are you one of those people?
I actually got over that quickly once I had made up my mind to lose the extra weight. I was obese pretty much my entire life and wanted to take ownership of that, rather than blaming my family, our cultural food habits and McDonalds (see “Why Egyptians Can’t Diet”). It wasn’t just some extra weight besara7ah, it was around 70 kilos. Yes, 70 extra kilos. I was a total of 160 kilos and now I am 90. It took me around a year and two months to get that off. I will definitely be sharing with you my experiences over the coming weeks here on Scoop Empire, but today, I simply wanted to start with telling you to being conscious. Just know who you are (in numbers), what you want to do and where you want to go.
Work on that, and more next week.
WE SAID THIS: If you want to turn around your diet, check out these healthy snacks to keep in your bag.