Have you noticed the About Andy section of the blog yet? If not, let me bring you up to speed as to what is going on over there. Yes, there is a short biography about me, but there are also a bunch of pictures. I'll tell you why they are there.
A piece of advice that I received a long time ago was that weight loss doesn't always go according to our plans. We hit those wonderful things called "plateaus" and we can't seem to get our weight any lower that what it's been for the past - say, for instance - three months. It can get discouraging to step up on the scales when you aren't visually seeing those results you want.
The best thing to combat those plateaus is to track your weight loss by other means. Some people choose clothing sizes, which works just fine. It can even be very motivating for some if they're trying to get down to the next size. I choose to go another, less expensive route.
I take pictures. Every month, within the same five-day period, I take a picture of myself. Most of the time, my wife takes it for me and we try to take it in the same place or at least with the same pose every time. The first picture shown was one of me where I wasn't actually posing because of my weight. It was a picture of me on my birthday, while I was out with my wife and son on a geocaching trip.
The next photo was taken three months later, just as a starter picture for this blog. I didn't know until a month later what a favor I had done for myself. In a month's time, I hadn't lost the weight that I had planned on losing, and I was telling a friend about it. They said, "Why not take a photo of yourself and track it again in a month? That way you can still see the fat coming off of you." I went out and took a picture that moment, and that was how it all began.
After doing that for a few months, I thought it would be a good idea to share my progress with everyone, not just with my weekly stats updates. I didn't want the blog to just be pictures of me though, so I started adding them to my "About Andy" page. That's where I've been putting them ever since.
The bottom line is that you don't have to be like me and put your pictures up on the internet. But if you want a cool way to track your personal fitness goals, then try taking a picture of yourself every month. If you want to see more drastic changes, try taking one every six months, but be warned that you may miss something that you would want to correct by not taking pics on a more regular basis.
If you don't want to put your pictures up on the internet, that's fine. Something you can try since the photos you take will be more private is taking pictures of yourself either in your underwear or naked. It sounds perverted and gross; I know.
But isn't this one of the main reasons we're doing this? Don't we all want to look good naked?
(If you do take those pictures in your birthday suit, I might suggest hiding them well.)
No comments:
Post a Comment