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Persistence Pays

So, I managed to reach my goals last week and I lost 1.8 pounds. Which is as good as two for me because it changes the main number on my tracker. This makes 12 pounds total (in 10 months) and thus I only need to lose four more to get back to what I'd lost originally. If I keep this up and lose around 2 a week, I will be back to where I was and only need to lose another 3 to get to 10%. This is my goal by November. We'll see.

This brings me to my next revelation. I realized this week that every time I set goals for myself with my eating and exercise I make them very specific. This likely stems from my volleyball days where my coaches spent a good amount of time helping us learn to set measurable and attainable goals and then into my teacher days where my advisor/professor helped us learn to write specific measurable objectives for our students. This is a great skill if you're trying to teach kids to identify a perfect 5th or are working on the perfect serve. But I see now that I have to give myself more wiggle room to succeed in this respect. For months I've set goals about walking 20 minutes four days but nothing about my eating. Or that I had to track everything without allowing myself to have days where I just had to start over. My goals last week were simply to walk, and track the best I could. I did both of those things, and it felt really good to get results.

So for this week, I'm going to have the same goals. The only difference is that I'm going to challenge myself to do a better job of tracking how much water I drink and then to drink more water. I think I probably drank more than I wrote and that's why this is another goal this week.

New goals:
1. track
2. walk
3. track water better

On another note, I only walked 3 days last week. I'dl ike to get to where I'm walking continuously for at least 30 minutes, but I'm not going to do that until I get in the habit of going at all. I ended up walking to the grocery store two of those times. Yesterday I got to my choir retreat about an hour early without realizing it. When I called a colleague in the choir to make sure I was at the right place, she pointed out to me that no one was there because it didn't start for another hour. Initially my first reaction was, "oh well, I'll sit in my car and drink my coffee then" but then I thought, "this is such a cute neighborhood and I love looking at the houses, I'm going to walk for 45 minutes." And I did, and I didn't stop at the grocery store. And my legs were tingling during warm-ups haha! I think these kinds of opportunities will be what helps me be successful.

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