I have been trying to lose a stone for about a year now. It’s not a lot of weight but it has gradually crept on in the last 4-5 years and I wanted to address it before I find myself fat and fifty.
I’ve always done a bit of yoga and a bit of running, but recently I’ve upped the ante – running a couple of times during the week as well as my weekends, and chucking in a few more yoga sessions too.
And I’ve been watching what I am eating – making it salad at work, no wine at home – all that. Making sure I get enough sleep – as supposed to do the trick. So that worked for the first 4-5 pounds, and then my weight loss has stopped. All this hard work and deprivation and I haven’t shifted from 73 kilos. For weeks. Now don’t give me all that ‘measure the inches’ and ‘muscle weighs more than fat’– its still 10 pounds of fat wobbling about my torso that remains steadfastly stuck. I think I’ve been doing all the right things but its not working.
It reminds me so much of when I first started the journey towards my £40m goal. We’d been at £1m for years and I addressed so much in my business – professionalized my behaviour, learnt a lot more, systemized and documented and focused a lot on sales – and started to see the uplift and then it plateaued. That year we ended up adding to a mere 10% on turnover. And even less profit than the year before. Which was rubbish. It felt utterly galling that despite all I was trying to do it wasn’t actually working.
So I really had to look at what I was doing wrong to try and fix this. And here’s what I discovered.
- The reality was this – when I looked in intrinsic detail I wasn’t persisting consistently enough for momentum to be gained. Its tricky as our entrepreneurial nature often works in short full on bursts of energy but the persistence and consistency is genuinely what brings results. It was all very well to work flat out for 4 weeks and then let a project tail off (habitual behaviour for me for 19 + years) but big sustained growth needs persistence and consistency daily.
- And it wasn’t enough to commit to it mostly – I had to commit to it wholly. And I thought I had – but actually that last year I divorced, fell in and out of love, had children doing exams, faced financial challenges etc etc – my focus had only been 80% business. I need to concentrate on it 100%.
- I had to change something in the recipe. Something wasn’t gelling/working/helping – for me it was people – there were two people who were taking up so much time they were holding us back – our team recipe wasn’t working so it needed changing.
- I needed better monitoring – my perception of all we were doing was far from the reality so I increased the daily monitoring infrastructure so I could get a better idea at the time of our daily progress – rather than getting ¾ of the way through the year and thinking – we are going to miss target – when there is little we can do about it.
Needless to say since then our growth rates have been 40%, 60% and now 100% – which is a bit more like it. Still not enough BTW – but far from shabby.
I am going to apply this on the diet front:
- Persist – daily and consistently long term persistence
- Fully commit – this has to be my key personal project for a while
- Change the recipe – because what I was doing before hasn’t been working
- Monitor daily – calories and activity – so I can get on top of performance dips before they scupper Project weight loss.
It’s not easy you know. I sat in this Friday night (staying away from temptation) TBH feeling a bit miserable and deprived – and then I gave myself a big kick up the arse. Because as I say about the entrepreneurial journey – we are living in a way today to live in a way tomorrow that most people never will. In a small way my diet is the same thing – my sacrifice now will return me to the svelte physique many people aged 40+ want – but very few commit to the lifestyle, exercise and careful eating that is required.
It is a choice to pursue a standard higher than most people want to achieve. It does take sacrifice and it does take commitment but in order to change your destiny you need to be ready to commit what it takes – because a half-arsed effort is what the rest of the world does – and then moans about being skint/fat/poor etc. And we don’t want to be like them now do we.
Right, am off for a run – catch you later!