Altered From Within

"Neither situations nor people can be altered by the interference
of an outsider. If they are to be altered, that alteration must come from
within."Phyllis Bottome (1884-1963, American writer)

I don't even know how much of my life I've wasted trying to change 
other people, to mold them into the perfect model of who I thought 
they ought to be.  It's been a lot of squandered time for sure.  The 
truth is that I can't change anyone else but myself.  I have all the 
power in the world to make changes in myself and in my own situations, 
but not one ounce of power to change someone else.  I wish I had been
taught that when I was a young child.  I could have saved myself a lot
of heartaches and headaches for sure.

And once I finally did learn this amazing truth, I found it
to be so liberating.  I could just stop working so hard trying to 
accomplish the impossible task of forcing someone else's change.  Wow!
What liberation!  What a weight off my shoulders!  I can't do it!  So,
I can just stop trying so hard and give myself a break.

There are a lot of people out there trying to force someone else to 
do something that the person being forced doesn't want to do.  Well,
listen up, folks!  Stop it.  Stop spinning your wheels.  Stop raising
your blood pressure to dangerous heights.  Stop worrying yourself to
death over your failure to do something that is impossible to do!  Set
yourself free by letting go. 
 
That doesn't mean you have to like whatever it is that you've
been working so hard to change for someone else.  And neither does it
mean that you are required to put up with the obnoxious behavior or the
dangerous lifestyle or whatever it is.  What it does mean is that you
can use your energy to evaluate your reaction to the situation because
that's something that you truly have control over.  You can devote your
time and energy to something productive:  what are you going to do in
response to the situation?  Do you want to just accept it and live 
with it?  That's certainly a possibility.  Do you want to distance 
yourself from the situation?  That's another viable option.  Maybe you 
just want to live and let live; in other words, let the person who is
not doing what you want him or her to do reap the consequences of his
or her actions.  In fact, maybe if someone is left to face his or her
own consequences instead of having a false sense of how things are 
because you're constantly rescuing them, he or she just might decide
to make a change.  And that's the only way change is ever going to 
happen anyway.  The author of change is the self.  A person has to be
altered from within.  Any unbearable situation has to be altered from
within. That's the only way there is for change to happen.

Once you've been set free of someone else's responsibility,
you can find time for doing positive things for yourself.  And just 
letting go will set you free.

My father used to say, "Don't waste your time trying to teach 
a pig to sing.  It only frustrates you and irritates the pig!"  How 
true.  Nothing is more frustrating than trying to accomplish the 
impossible.  And nothing is more liberating than relinquishing the 
pig back to its destiny in the pig sty.  Of course, a pig can't change 
itself.  It is what it is.  But humans can change who they are when 
they decide it's what they want.  They can become the highest form 
of whomever they have ever wanted to be.  But the alteration has to 
come from within.

 

Stepping It Up

“A beautiful woman must expect to be more accountable for her steps, than one less attractive.”
~Samuel Richardson

The college where I work is promoting healthier living by challenging employees to compete for the next two months in tracking the number of steps we take each day.  We have charts to fill out daily, and we’re to submit our charts with our totals in December.  The person who has accumulated the most steps in the time period of the challenge will win a prize!  I have wanted to get myself motivated to exercise, and I love a challenge, so I have chosen to participate.  The challenge began Wednesday.

I have no idea how many steps other people take, but I suspected that I didn’t take nearly as many as most folks and not enough to prevent weight gain, much less to lose weight.  I have heard that the magic number is 10,000 steps per day.  That would be the equivalent of about 10 miles per day.  Not all at one time!  But the total of all steps taken in every situation during the day.  10,000 steps seems like a lot to me.  But I had no idea how I compared to that until I put on a pedometer and actually counted my steps.

I fell way short of 10,000!  Wednesday, I stepped a grand total of 3, 758 steps.  I’m going to round that up to 4, 000!  Okay, so I’m 6, 000 steps short of 10,000, but what does that mean?  I checked around online, and it seems that most experts rank the number of steps as follows:

Under 5,000 – sedentary, very inactive (that’s me right now!)

5,000 – 7,500 – low active

7500 – 10,000 – somewhat active

10,000+ – active

12, 500+ – extremely active

Okay, so I’m sedentary or very inactive, which is what I suspected!  I actually did some things to increase my steps on Wednesday to get as many in as I did just doing my normal activities.  I went to a bathroom further down the hall from my office, I parked as far away from the building entrance as I could in the parking lot, and I took a walk over to another building on campus that I usually don’t go to.  Without all those extra steps, I might have only taken about 2,000 steps in a day.  But either way, I’m still in the low active category.

10,000 steps seem very far away.  I’m probably not going to make it to 10,000 overnight or even in one week.  I’m not in any kind of shape to start stepping 6,000 to 7,000 more steps in a day than I do now.  But I can increase my daily steps gradually so that I can get myself to my goal of 10,000 steps in a day.  So, that’s what I’m going to do.

One suggestion that I kept seeing over and over again as I explored online about counting steps is to just monitor what you actually walk in a day, and then make your first goal to increase whatever that is by 2,000 steps.  One source said if you do that, you probably will stop gaining weight.  I think 2,000 steps a day seems reasonable to add to what I normally do.  That’s two miles over the course of the day.  But in order to do that, I’m going to have to do more than just park further away from the entrance or use a bathroom a few steps further down the hall. 

Here are some things I think I can do to make my 2, 000 extra steps goal:

• Take a walk up and down my driveway a few times before I get in my car to leave for work in the mornings.
• Park in a more distant parking lot from my building every work day.
• Make a circuit walk around the hallways here in my building three times a day while I’m at work (maybe every time I go to the bathroom if I go more than three times during the day).
• Take a walk up and down my driveway a few times when I get home before I go inside.
• Do more housework! 
• Instead of conserving energy, which I’m an expert at, take more steps to do everything I do at home or anywhere else.  In other words, take the long way around instead of figuring out the shortest route.

That’s all I’m going to do this next week, and I’ll let you know if I was able to get my movements up from 3,000 steps a day to 5,000 a day.  If I can do that, then I’m half way to my goal of 10,000 steps!

I know I won’t win this competition at work.  But adding more steps to my day every day will make me a winner anyway!  The competition is just a means to get myself going.  But maybe they’ll have another challenge in the future, and I just may be more competitive by then!

Here is something that looks fun that I found online.  It’s called Web Walking USA, and you keep up with your steps and chart your progress in a cross country walk.  I believe they said that you should count each 1000 steps as a mile.  I think I’m going to do that, too, so I can see how far I’m going while I’m stepping it up. 

http://walking.about.com/cs/measure/a/webwalkingusa.htm

 

Plus Size Exercise

 

I thought I would give some details as to my exercise routine.  Exercise is not a one size fits all program.  Especially, if one is older or considerably overweight.  Considering that I fit into both of those categories, I decided to find what worked best for me, and at a pace that I could comfortably sustain and build on.  I ditched  an “all or nothing” mentality.  Any exercise I implemented, no matter how small, was better than what I had been doing.  Besides, I wasn’t interested in trying to impress anyone.   My goal was to get more exercise into my routine, and to become healthier and stronger.  I took baby steps and built on my successes as I became lighter and stronger.

We all have our own particular vanities, things that bother us, or get hung up about.  Right now, I need to spend more time sending loving vibes to my turkey wings, and less time hating them.  Needless to say, since that is a point of concern for me, my initial “Big Gurl Workout” included all kinds of exercise using hand weights to tone my upper body.  Especially, turkey wing trimming exercises.   I did the following exercises (using 3 pound hand weights for the dumbbell exercises):

Alternating Dumbbell Bicep Curls

Boxing w/Dumbbells

Dumbbell Flys

Dumbbell Lateral Raises

Dumbbell Shoulder Press

Dumbbell Tricep Extensions

Wall Pushups

Triceps Lifts (Can be done with dumbbells also)

To work out my lower body, I mainly walked or exercised on a stationary bicycle.

Currently, I am trying out the 7-Day Bootcamp Workout that I found on Sparkpeople.  It’s supposed to give my entire body the work out it needs.  The most important thing is to begin somewhere, even if it seems really small, and continue to build on your success. 

You can do it once you put your mind to it.