I Don’t Have Time For Weight Loss: 7 Steps To Get It!

I DON’T HAVE TIME FOR WEIGHT LOSS: 7 STEPS TO GET IT! (Issue 14)

by Diane Gold

In the past weeks, I have been hearing over and over again how people don’t have the time in their busy lives to work on their weight. I am going to talk about weight loss, but the same applies to weight gain of any kind. It also applies to many of life’s weights such as feeling sad, angry, bullied, alone or misunderstood.

Two weeks ago, I had a plumbing issue in my house. I became defocused because of it. I was fairly consumed about the hygiene of my house and whether the issue could be affordably resolved. Of course, I had to move rugs and furniture, clean floors multiple times and make multiple arrangements with plumbers. What I didn’t have to do was to choose to allow this issue to live in my head when I was not moving rugs, cleaning floors and talking to plumbers.

Part of what snapped me out of the plumbing crisis was the fact that my daughter, who lives near her vet medicine school, came down with the food-transmitted, week-long version of salmonella (intestinal bacteria) which included hospitalization. Thankfully, she is OK, and the plumbing pipes are fixed but too old to last long.

My systematic approach to time and creation management is in place most of the time. As we say in the martial world, we show our true selves in adversity, how balanced and prepared we are or are not.

I realized how fortunate I am that I follow my own program most of the 365 days a year for most years. It has brought me to want to share these seven steps that give us time for weight loss.

1)    GRATITUDE. The most important part of the day occurs as it begins. We get a chance to rejoice, to jump up and down with glee, to fill our hearts with warm happiness. Why? Because we awoke and have another shot at growing, creating something great, helping someone out and getting help ourselves.

This might sound like hype, but the alternative would be that we didn’t get the chance to get up and go. So, yeah, be happy about it. When we are happy, our focus is better and so is the way we use our time. This should take 5 seconds.
2)    SELF-RECOGNITION. Now that we have awakened, we can take 10 seconds to stretch and recognize how lucky everyone else is that we have arrived in the conscious world and are here to do something brilliant and creative, help someone or call on someone. It is our job to be productive, so we might as well recognize ourselves for it. When we root ourselves through self-recognition, our actions become streamlined and time economical.

3)    POWER WAKE UP (aka meditation or chi wake up). Once we stand up (or sit up in our wheel chair or sit up in bed if that’s how it is), let’s feel the power of our body. Let’s take 30 seconds just to stand (or sit or lie) and feel our blood supply coursing through our veins. This action will wake us, allow us to pump up without anything more. We get emotional power from physical power. Powering up daily will increase and sustain our power. When we feel powerful, we act at peak performance. When we are at our peak, we treat time as the preciously valuable dimension that it is.

4)    CHEERLEADING. As we are doing our morning routine, we should take 15 seconds to pick out our goal for the day. It could be to wash two loads of laundry, take the first step to doing our taxes, make 50 phone calls to tell people about our business, call the girl we talked to from last year’s gym class that we promised to call. Whatever it is, those 15 seconds will bring us to laser focused attention. We will commit ourselves to one task (this exercise is in addition to longer term goals, if we have them). This cheering ourselves on will methodically lead us down our path. We can use the cheering behavior for the rest of the day until we have reached our target.

Imagine we are on a treasure hunt, and we know we are close to finding the treasure. The time that we spend in looking for it is so energetic, proficient and precise because we are highly motivated to find the treasure. We are internally cheerleading. This enables decisive time economy and allows us to find more time for weight issues.

5)    REACH OUT TO ONE. No matter what kind of day we are having, no matter how busy we think we are, no matter where in life’s journey we are; we should take one minute out to reach out to someone and say hello. This could be on the bus to work or school, while putting the trash can outside, while going to the mini mart on the way to play volleyball. If we don’t know anyone we can call, if we work or school from home or if we can’t go out and don’t have anyone who lives with us; we can say hello to our neighbor or to the first person we see riding a bicycle near our front door. If no one rides by, we can call the phone company and ask about our bill. If we have an internet connection, we can reach out globally to half the world.

What does this have to do with time management? When we communicate with another person, our perspective modifies itself, often in a positive way. We realize we are an integral part of the world as we know it and that people have something to offer us and vice versa. With this realization, we can become more productive and motivated and can use our time more efficiently.  Then there is more time for weight loss.

6)    TOP OF THE AGENDA. When we want to do something, we usually schedule it in, right? Think about what happens when we feel like eating a particular food. Funny how we have no problem scheduling that in. Yet, when we want to remove some pounds from our stomach by doing some tai chi or fitness activity that would take less time than it would take to go get the food we craved, we don’t have (make) the time.
Looking from a different angle, when we see that our daughters are having weight issues, we bake a cake. Or we encourage them to make sure to have a big appetite when visiting grandma and grandpa. Or we think we are being generous when we decide to buy our daughters’ clothing when they are four sizes larger than they want to be. What are we thinking? Where’s our agenda then?
By keeping the weight loss goal (or weight gain goal or emotional weight goal) on our calendars, we keep it fresh in our minds. If it’s scheduled in, we have already made the time.  15 seconds.

7)    WRAP UP MEETING. When it is time for bed, let’s have a small 30-second meeting with ourselves. No matter what else is on the agenda, let’s review how we managed with the other six items in this plan. The program takes two minutes, 45 seconds a day. It should bring us one extra minute for each of these seven steps because we get stimulated after we eat good food, see good friends, succeed at creating something great, lose a pound. That totals seven minutes. Subtract two minutes, 45 seconds from seven and get four minutes, 15 seconds.
This meeting gives us more time because it keeps us accountable to ourselves for weight loss. It shows us how easy it is to make time through scheduling, focus and the positive effects of infrastructure. We begin to save time in other areas of our day, which we can add on to weight loss time.

CONCLUSION

When we carry extra weight, it consumes us. We wake up knowing it; we go to school and work knowing it; we go to sleep knowing it. Spending time on the idea of extra weight uses up our time in a way that doesn’t benefit us. When we take an organized approach to our objectives, whatever they are, we have less time to live in our negative, overweight thoughts. We might even have time for an exercise or two from the WarriorsOfWeight.com inbox magazine.

When our lives have so many things pulling at them that we think we are about to break AND we carry extra weight, it is almost too much. Tension from other weight issues often drives us to eat. It also tends to create a funnel-like image in our minds, not unlike a tornado, in which all the problems that ever were and ever will be are floating around above our heads clouding our thoughts.

Extra weight makes us feel bad; not like our looks; shorten our life span and the time we could be with our grandchildren. We choose to have time for ourselves. We choose to have time for our favorite people and food. We don’t find time for people we don’t like just as we think we are in control if we walk away from food we don’t like.

We can start now by picking one of the seven steps to do for a week. Once we complete one of the steps for seven straight days, we should continue to do it for another seven days and, at the same time, add another step.

Every two weeks, we should add another step until, in 13 weeks, we will have time for weight loss and we will have adjusted our minds to lose it.

FEEDBACK

Please leave your comments in the comment section below. Your experience and feedback can be very helpful to others in the community.
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DIANE GOLD, AUTHOR

Diane Gold, Founder of Warriors of Weight, Moms For Healthy Daughters, is a mentor in tai chi, kung fu and meditation, a music and  stress expert and a dedicated mom. She believes that we are the masters of our fate as long as we get the chance to wake up successfully. She says, “If we put half the effort into advocating for ourselves as we do in caring for others, we’d spend lots of time on ourselves.”

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