Losing weight should not be the goal
Keeping losing weight as your goal will stop you from diving into the knowledge and practise of workout at gym. Many people want to lose weight, regardless whatever reasons, but losing weight becomes so strong for them to open their eyes to other aspects of workout such as grow muscle, strengthen the whole body. If you really want to enjoy doing workout, please learn to appreciate its beauty and its huge benefits in your whole life. If my main goal was losing weight, I wouldn’t have come so far. I was working out not because I need to lose weight and get more fit but because I felt my spirit needed it.
2021 was the year of change
Without any prior knowledge about workout, I bought my first Personal Training courses with some doubt about the future progress on my body shape on June 2020, by which time the body fat percentage was up to 39%. It was hard, really hard at the beginning. My body needed time to get used to the new movements and new weight I lifted. If losing weight was my goal, then I achieved it after one-year of ‘workout’ at the gym. However, the body shape was not improving in a meaningful way — no 6-pack abs, no appearing muscle. Strange as it was. Why losing weight was not exactly the same as building a REAL physical fitness?
At some point, it became overwhelming to come to gym after daily job and finished it within two hours before riding subway to my far-away home. I wanted to get in shape. But I was very, very skeptical about my body potential. It’s who I was supposed to be, having body fat equal to 39%.
My old bro told me that it would at least take two years for a beginner of workout to come close to the ‘6-pack abs’ shape. You couldn’t achieve it in such short period. Well, I boiled the self-doubt for a while, and then something critical came to my realisation that my poor diet must contributed a lot to my ‘slow growth’. It was a big mistake I had made during my many months efforts dedicated to the workout journey. At least it explained the reason why I still had ‘big’ belly fat after so many months efforts. That’s when the magic started to happen. It started from July 2021, and I posted about new diet on social media platforms, visible to all of my network connections and even the strangers on Instagram. Throughout exposing yourself to big audience, you would push yourself much harder to stick with it. It’s a way of manifesting what I want. Believe it or not, I gradually lost my belly fat to the extent that the muscles were awakened to working on their own, autopilot, so to speak. As the weeks went on, I was surprised to find out that I became desired to do my workouts and enjoyed them. They are my best friends. When I shared the toned belly image with my best friend, I could literally felt his proud. YES, desiring to making beneficial changes to our lives during pandemic is feeling great!
The huge benefits from my workouts
- Achieving Physical fitness
- Establishing a healthy diet
- Building up confidence
- Becoming more energetic
The new version of life
I could feel the difference while walking down the street, riding two-hour subway by standing with a kindle book to read, climbing many-steps stairs, carrying heavy bags, open heavy doors, etc. I also started to appreciate the analogy of workout used in various books. Workout is an attitude to your own life. You want to live your life intentionally.
What made me want to work out and keep it as a daily routine were all the benefits I feel, physically, mentally, and spiritually.
This blog was originally published on Medium. Dive into the full article here: Body Transformation in One Year.
