You know when you get stuck in that dreadful negative loop – whatever the topic – and you can’t get out. You know the one I mean – you feel sad, depressed, unhappy, unconfident cause you’re a little chubby; so, you eat to make yourself feel better. It’s comfort eating. But that means you gain more weight, so you feel more unhappy, and you reach for food. Never ending circle. Well – not always. It is possible to snap out of it – as proved by yours truly, though it did take me a looooonnnnnng time to do it. And I mean years – when I think about my food habits.
Well, as turns out it is also possible to get stuck in a positive loop. Perhaps describing it as ‘getting stuck’ is incongruent with this scenario. Moving into a positive loop can be a good thing – is a good thing, no? Maybe not always and not completely – after all too much of a good thing can be bad for you, right.
However, let’s for a few minutes focus on the beneficial side of getting stuck in a positive loop. Here’s what I mean – my current example. I lost a few a pounds of weight and few inches off my waist. As a result I feel great about myself – about the way I look and the way I feel. The knock on effect of that being, that I’m more confident and happy, and energized to get off the sofa and shake that booty like it was my last day on earth. The net effect of that being, I get my daily exercise and then some, continue to shed those grams heading towards my next weight goal, and those millimetres off my waist. That makes me feel better about myself, I feel my energy is boosted, so I boogie again, shake that booty, snake those hips, pump out that chest, and twist those legs. And so on, and so forth.
I’ve recently fallen into that positive loop of activities.
I have to admit though – again, that I was a bit dubious about my ability to keep on trimming and slimming my waistline and my weight with doing just dance workouts, and dropping the HIIT sessions. Those HIITs were so much hard work, the dance work-outs just don’t seem to have the same effect. At least that’s been my impression on the surface.
After recovering my eating habits back to pre-Christmas routine, and pretty much dropping the HIITs, February has been all about the dance work-outs and splits training (still working on those). Initially it’s been slow going – in fact, the whole thing stalled, not for the first time.
As time moved on, my dancing increased, the happy feeling inside me grew, I started to see the weight shift on the scales. Just like before, few grams at a time – few steps forward, few steps back, few steps on the spot, but overall, down, down and down. Then the other day I took out my measure and twisted that thing around my waist. It’s been a while. And……….. I’ve lost another 1 cm off my waist. It may not seem like much to some – but have you read my Recap post. Those insignificant millimetres initially, have added up to nearly 10cm off my waist and drop in dress-size. So I will take every single one of these millimetres. (in fact a little confession – the recent inches lost is just one part of it. At my chubbiest, my waist was a nice round 100cm!!!)
So there it is – a positive loop, a happy loop of activities that is keeping me trim, toned and what’s most important, keeping me training, moving, exercise, eating well and above all…………..happy, actually confident, less self-conscious about my body. I like this positive loop. It’s like the yin to the yang.
Hate To Exercise 