5 Things you should do if you want to start lose weight and be healthy.

This was me at 110kg last February 2020 at Elnido Palawan, Philippines.

Before you proceed to this list, i would like you to know that i am not a professional coach or trainer. These things that i will be stating here are based all on my personal experience. I hope after reading this you would have picked up something and get inspired.

1. Just do it - before anything else in this list this is the most important for me, i wouldn't be able to do everything else in this list if i did not just do it. No excuses, no ill do it tomorrow etc. I was "lucky" enough that i started to work out when Covid-19 hit, the lock down in the Philippines had just started and i did not have anything else to do. I believe that you first have to do something over and over again until our bodies get accustomed to it that even though our heads say no our bodies will still push us to move.

2. Be consistent - so you have already done the above, you already started and you are on a streak. Now you have to be consistent, if you are working out 3 times a week you have to be religious about it. Do not skip a day, consistency is the key here. This way our bodies would adjust properly to anything that we are doing. I read somewhere that if you do something for 21 straight days muscle memory is gonna kick in. You would not even have to think for you to do, it will come naturally. In my experience this is what happened to me with running, sometimes when i wake up i don't want to move, i don't want to do anything, but my leg muscles knows that it is already time to move in the end i would be running 5 or 10 kilometers that morning.

3. Get enough sleep - you are not superhuman, there are times you would feel that you are, since you have been working out you are now "healthier" and "stronger" and that you can do everything at any time. That is wrong, personally when i felt that i was getting "healthier" i would go out and drink at my friends house, we would all stay up late, i would always say that "its okay im working out anyways". That way of thinking of mine is very wrong. Our bodies need rest and if we want to live a healthy lifestyle we are going to have to sacrifice some things that we were doing before. Fitness and not sleeping amply do not go together well.

4. Acceptance - this came in late for me, if you are here reading this work on it already. Accept that you are unhealthy and over weight, i used to be always mad at people telling me im fat, even with my parents, if one of them told me i was over eating or that i look like a pile of blob already i would be furious i would be looking at them with a mad face and tell them that i could still play basketball, i could still workout and run like i used to (or so i thought) and my day would be ruined, in my head its my body so respect it. I see this all over the internet, yes it is our body, but remember, we look at ourselves always at an angle we feel comfortable looking at, remember that. In our eyes we will never be "overweight".

All these things we see online saying that my body, my choice, its okay its really our choice all the time, but where do we draw the line? When we find out we have a cholesterol problem? When we find out that we have high blood pressure? When we realize that our uric acid is high? Or when we just collapse out of nowhere? Do not let everything you see online influence your life.

Lets do an exercise.

Take an old picture of you when you know you were healthier and compare to it now. Here's mine.

On the left is me way back 2015, and the one right is me at March 2020

Are you happy with what you see? If not, do something about it.

5. Set a goal - i put this last because it came last for me at my 4th month of journey that is only when i had a goal in mind i want to reach 85kg which is till now i am working on. This goal will change through the process believe me, now my goal is to weigh 75kg in the next 2 months. Now if you have already done all the 4 things before this line you now have target to reach. Do everything in your power to reach this goal, do not give up, do not lose hope. Im rooting for you.

For inspiration, this was me then, and this is me now.