Last Updated on July 30, 2021
Yes, yes, I know I have mentioned in an earlier post that it is highly unlikely that I will quit the gym… ever because I have enjoyed tremendous health benefits from living a more active lifestyle. I do not deny that joining gyms are truly beneficial- especially if you are living a highly stressed lifestyle and do not have much time to exercise. Furthermore, with increase of crime rates like snatch thief- it makes it totally unsafe to exercise outdoors.
However, life is very unpredictable and the future may not just turned out the way we plan or anticipate. I apologise that my posts have not been consistent lately as I have been out of the country often. The fact that I was out of the country so often for the last 6 months made it very impractical for me to keep the gym membership. And I had been paying for months without visiting the gym.
With much reluctance, I went and cancel my gym membership about 2 months ago.
During more than 2 years of gym membership, I have been struggling to have my weight reduced to my target weight. When I joined the gym, initially I did not lose weight because I cheated at cardio machines and did not eat right. I started reading up a lot of information about health, exercise and eating and took up a certification course. I also started on resistance training– learning on the correct type of weight, sets and duration. With that, I was able to drop 5kgs and maintain that weight loss. And because I was doing resistance or weight training, even losing 5kg makes a lot of difference- it is very different when you lose 5kg to exercising compared to just dieting alone.
Still, I have another 5kg to go which always seemed to stuck- in fact, I had carried that weight for decades. After I quit the gym, I spent a lot of time travelling and enjoy doing lots of outdoor work. I was active throughout the day and always on the move. I never noticed the weight loss till I came back to Malaysia recently and stepped on the weighting scale and found out that I had dropped to my targeted weight- the weight I had when I was 11 years old.
Ultimately, I did not lose the weight because I cut back on any group of food, avoided high GI food, cut down sugar or obsess over exercising. In fact, I ate typical Chinese food with bread and biscuits for breakfast. I do not choose on the food- I ate whatever that was available and whatever my family ate.
The change came from within. Over these few months, I have trained a lot to let go of inner baggage and attachments. I learned to live a more simplified life, and somehow, seemed to lose a lot of both inner and outer anger. Probably there were some kind of psychological factor holding me back and preventing me from losing that last 5kilos but that seemed to be gone.
We actually hold lots of inner baggage comprising of stuff such as: repressed anger, unresolved conflicts and grief. If we do not learn to let go, it will flow into other aspects of our lives and wreck havoc in it. Many people have the victim mentality– having the convictions that they are victims and life had been unfair, etc, etc. Feeling sorry for ourselves is just our ego’s way of tricking us that we have the right to carry those feelings. We have to let them go- if not, we will never be happy. And if we are not happy, we will tend to hold something back- an addiction (alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, dysfunctional relationships, etc) and unsuccessful weight loss.
Therefore, the next time you find that no matter what you tried, you cannot seemed to lose that weight, access your inner self to determine if there is anything that may be holding you back.
