Reflect…

Well, yesterday was a busy dance day.  Practiced with my dance partner for a little over an hour.  Then I went to the West Coast Swing classes taught by the most fabulous Beata Howe and “Pappa Daddy” TRose aka Terry Roseborough.  That was another 3 hours of dancing.  OMG!  Oh, my aching feetsies.  Ouchies!  Oh da pain, da pain.

Ok, ok, maybe I’m being a bit dramatic, (hey being dramatic is what I do…I wouldn’t be “Tony” without the drama!)

…but in all seriousness, I did kinda push things.

So, now I know, at my current fitness level, doing four hours of dancing/learning/practicing is very close to “over doing it.”

The trick is to find exactly the right amount of exercise with which to stress my body.  I may have to alternate “heavy days” like yesterday with “easy days” or “rest days” while I’m still on the bottom end of the “fit” range.

It is true that I’m trying to build up stamina but I’ve also got to not overdo it and injury myself.  It is important to give my body a chance to repair itself and build itself stronger.

That’s how you get fitter; you stretch your limits, rest a bit, then stretch your limits again.  Eventually tasks that were difficult become easier.  Then they become routine and then you have to stretch further to keep on improving.  Woot!

Revel…

Who da man?  Who da Pappa Daddy?  Who is on track on his fitness goals!  Come on, chant with me…  “Go Tony!  Go Tony! Go Tony!”

Doing those little circle things with your hands clenched in a fist is optional, but encouraged.  🙂

Here are the cold hard numbers:

-- 12.2 lbs lost (total so far)
-- 1 lb lost at the official Jenny Craig Weigh-in this week.
-- 5.65 inches lost (total so far) - Hips, Chest, Waist
-- .4 inches lost this past week.

Yay!  2013 is on track!  Woo Hoo!    Here are the charts and the cool fun visual stuff:

Reward…

I’ve got a chart where I’ve marked certain “goals” or “milestones” and when I reach one of those milestones, I am planning on rewarding myself.  My first milestone was “Losing the first 5 lbs!”  Yay.  I didn’t actually reward myself until two weeks has past.  I currently have 12.2lbs so I figured I could safely state I had met that first goal.  So here is how I rewarded myself:

I ordered a bottle of shampoo from the Arizona Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix, AZ.  Why, you may ask?  Well because one of the very few times I have completely totally relaxed was at that hotel.  It was awesome.

Back in 2003, I had gone there to attend the IGRA Dance Contest and the hotel had overbooked people into the “basic” level of room and since we arrived late that night, the hotel no longer had any rooms of that type left.

So the hotel “upgraded” our room and put us into a condo. An apartment.  A suite, a very nice suite.  The kind of thing that movie stars stay in, with a private balcony overlooking the golf course and a full kitchen and a full living room and a HUGE bathroom.

The bathroom was bigger than most hotel rooms I’ve stayed in.  Wow!

There were chocolates on the pillow every day and fresh flowers in the room and… Oh my.  SIGH.

Oh, and the towels were so big and soft that you could have laid them out on the floor and used them as a sleeping bag.

And there was this small pool near the cluster of condos which hardly any of the other guests used so basically I had it all to myself and….  *SIGH*

So, they had these tiny bottles of shampoo and conditioner which smelled awesome. I’m not usually “into” shampoo but this stuff was truly incredible.  So, I *ahem* BLUSH, Uhmmm….

Well, I kinda begged the housekeeping staff for about a dozen of them off their cart during the three days and two nights we were there.

And I used the shampoo very sparingly over the next couple of years.

The point?

Well every time I used the shampoo and sniffed the scent of the lather, it took me for a few moments back to the last day there, the day after the contest…

…when I was leaning on the balcony, looking out over the golf course at the distant mountains, mid-morning, after having slept in, wrapped in the super soft robe that came with the condo and drinking some truly amazingly good coffee (real cream) that came with the condo and feeling all clean and smelling of that wonderful shampoo and feeling 100% totally content and relaxed and happy.

Oh, did I mention that we had won the dance contest the night before?  Yeppers, life at that moment was pretty damned awesome.

So, now, as a reward, I bought myself a big bottle of that shampoo.  I had run out of those little bottles ages ago.  This big honking bottle should last me a while.  When I ordered it, I ordered it as a “gift” so it came wrapped with a fancy ribbon and a gift card and a handwritten note inside “Congrats on the weight loss!”  Nice!

I was not expecting a full-sized card and I was certainly not expecting a hand-written note but that is par for the course for this hotel.  It is a “Luxury Resort” and it is an awesome place.  Here are some more photos of it:

A Good Reward!

So, in the interest of educating the teeming masses, all eight of you actually reading this, here is why this kind of thing is such a good “reward.”

First and foremost, it is NOT FOOD!  Giving yourself food as a reward for losing weight is like giving a bottle of scotch to an alcoholic to celebrate his 1 year anniversary of being sober.  Not a good idea.

But something like this which will bring a warm fuzzy feeling to me every time I use it, is awesome.  Because every time I sniff that shampoo, it takes me to a great memory and that memory is an awesome positive one.  And now, I have linked “doing good on the fitness front” to an awesome memory and now when I sniff, I’m rewarded over and over again.

Go Team Tony!

Revise…

Ok, in a blog post not too long ago I laid out the brief version of my strategy to succeed in “Transforming Tony in 2013”:

1. Get plenty of sleep every night
2. Stretch daily
3. Lift (3 x a week)
4. Cardio (3 x a week)
5. Diet (in the sense of eating right, not in the sense of starving myself)
6. Dance (overlaps with cardio but not always — also overlaps with lifting, but not always)
7. Be “domestic” (e.g. laundry, dust, balance Quicken, pay bills, ride herd on the clutter, etc)
8. Be “entrepreneurial” (e.g. add designs to my online t-shirt/button/bag shop on Zazzle, write articles on Squidoo, promote and advertise my Line Dance Instruction business, etc)
9. Socialize and/or Relax

And now I’m adding the final item to make it a true “Ten Point Plan”  [drum roll please]

# 10 is “Revel, Reward, Reflect & Review, Revise”

Translated from “Tony-speak” to “Real English”, though technically I don’t use “Real English” since I’m an American and even more specifically I’m Texan, both of which are recognized by linguists as their own sub-grouping of English now separate and distinct from the Mother Tongue of England.

And we won’t even begin to discuss what those Scottish folks and those Irish speak.  Sounds great, but I don’t think it’s exactly English….

But I digress… Back to that whole “Revel, Reward, Review, and Revise”

Basically, as I move through my plan I need to constantly monitor and make changes when needed. And yesterday I discovered that I’m going to have to modify my schedule so that “heavy days” are followed by “easy days.”  In other words, if something isn’t working or isn’t producing results then I need to Review what I’m doing periodically and Revise if needed.

There is another aspect of Review that I need to point out.  Right now, in an effort to save some money, my dance partner and I are going through all of our saved videos/DVDs of lessons and performances.  The purpose of this review is to extract as much information from what we’ve already paid for before we go after new information in the form of additional private lessons.  Smart huh?  It was her idea.  *sigh* But smart nonetheless!  Woot!

Another part of Review is every once in a while it pays great dividends to go back and look at early videos/DVDs of your dancing.  Why?  Well because once you get past the cringing at the hair and/or costumes, you realize that “Hey, I’m better!  I have actually improved since I started dancing! Wow!  All that hard work is paying off!”

So pretty much covers “Review and Revise”

The Reward bit is pretty self-evident.  When I meet a goal, I give myself a “reward” of some kind.  Little or small depending on how big a milestone I just achieved.

The Revel bit is simply shout it to the housetops.  The words of support and encouragement from my friends as I make this journey to a fit, healthy, me, is priceless.

See ya on the dance floor!