The Two Week Hump

   Sunday through Friday are pretty much the same for me. I eat 5 balanced healthy meals a day. I also workout during my lunch break at work for an hour and run roughly 3-4 miles every day when I get home. As I type this out, I laugh because this is not how I pictured my days being when I first started this journey back in January. To be honest I was very nervous to workout at all when I first started. I was extremely out of shape and didn't even know where to begin exercising. As for the eating, my body knew there was something up on day 1 when  I opted for the oatmeal instead of the McDonalds McGriddle sausage and egg sandwich. Needless to say, the thought of losing weight was daunting, even trying to achieve the 2.5lb goal that I had set for that week seemed far away. Every day during the first week was worst than the last. I began to develop headaches. I was sore in places I didn't know could get sore. The first 2 weeks of your weight loss journey will not be fun. This isn't the Biggest Loser, where you will step up on a scale and lose 12 pounds the first week with a room of people clapping for you on national tv. Most likely you won't have a personal trainer and won't nearly eat as strict or workout as hard as you would be made to do by Jillian Micheals. You will have headaches, you will be sore. As an added bonus, you will probably also have a stressful life circumstance come up during your initial weeks which will make you want to throw in the towel and head to the nearest Dairy Queen. But this is where the most important character attribute gets developed that will help you last through this multi-month journey to reach your end result, its call perseverance.

    The truth of the matter is, your body does not want to change habits that it has developed over many years. Like a recovering drug addict, you will feel your body and your emotions going against you at every turn. But the key thing to understand, is this will not be permanent. You are retraining yourself physically and mentally and it is going to take time for your system to adapt. For me this change took roughly 2 weeks to happen. Thats not to say that the journey became a breeze after it, but the intensity of resistance from my body subdued greatly and I found myself growing a muscle that I had been lacking for many years, perseverance. Every day I looked at the "before" picture of myself that I took as motivation to not give up. Being great at procrastination, I even found myself what was formerly a vice to assist me in making it through this tough time. I would tell myself "I'll grab that Chic-Fil-A milkshake next week." There were even days when I just had to curl up in bed and hope to sleep away the pain. Whatever you need to do to make it through this time period, make sure you do it. Its going to be rough, but it is my experience that with radical change comes radical results!