Blogs as Motivation

Once, some time ago, when I was student, I had a minor academic interest in Psychology. Nowadays I can’t get enough pop-psych. Not self-help you understand, popular science books about psychology. Entertaining, easy to read and fascinating.

I’ve been reading both :59 Seconds and Quirkology by Richard Wiseman. :59 seconds in particular is excellent, especially if you are fond of self-help manuals. It debunks lots of traditional self help advice.

The area I wanted to mention was Motivation. For me and some of my newly found web-based, bike-loving and fat-fighting friends, we are in this to get fit again by losing weight. :59 Seconds has a chapter on Motivation. I realised that the advice given in this chapter was just what another man who was overweight and Joby have been doing in their individual successful fight to lose weight.

This is from page 94 of 59: seconds:

“To achieve your aims and ambitions, there are four key techniques that will help you succeed: having the right kind of plan; telling your friends and family; focusing on the benefits; and rewarding yourself each step of the way.”

There are several pages before this that fill in the details, which you should read, if you find that you would like to hone your motivation skills.

It struck me that the key techniques have been used by my chubby bikey friends. I personally reward myself with more cycling gear. The plan comes from the goals that people such as Joby have stated on their blogs, their blogs then inform friends and family of intentions and they talk in each blog post about the benefits of getting fit or losing weight ie. the benefits of their endeavors. Like me, they seem to reward themselves with bike related treats. It’s a winning combination and they along with many others such as Crimmy have been successful in this approach.

Many people are very open in their journey to thin. I’m not sure if it’s my generation or the fact that I generally don’t like to talk about personal stuff, but I find it difficult to write about them in blog post format. Clearly I should, if I want to find motivation. Another reason is that unfortunately/fortunately being a lardass is considered shameful. I say fortunately as in one of his podcasts Ricky Gervais invited people to chase him down the street screaming “You fat bastard”. In many ways we could all do with someone to do this to us, as we should probably feel bad about being fat, it’s not a good state to be in. Being overweight is held in an extremely negative light, maybe that’s good, but I guess that is perhaps one reason I’d sooner not discuss the issue.

Anyway, if you possibly hadn’t noticed, I am about five stone overweight. I wasn’t always so overweight, I have been fit and I have been thinner. It’s unfortunate that I let it get to this stage, but at least I’m doing something about it. So far I’ve lost a stone since I started exercising and cutting back the calories. I feel so much better, I love riding my bike (I can’t emphasize that enough), clothes are starting to fit and I am starting to feel much more positive about life in general.

I’ll set some goals as others have and hopefully this will help me reach them.

So, thanks to Richard Wiseman, to that man who used to be overweight and to Joby and to others who have used blogs to narrate their journeys to fitness.

The internet is a great thing, something I was acutely aware during this weekend’s walk in Hyde Park for the Mouth cancer foundation. I’ll post later to explain more.