I just came across a great little website centered around encouraging grassroots fitness through body weight exercises. I am a big fan of bodyweight exercises myself, and gave up the gym a few years back in favor of them. I have yet to regret the decision. Between my own exercises, and those I use at my dojo, the weight lifting was redundant. Check out the routine listed here, and check out SimpleFit.org when you get the chance.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Leo, over at ZenHabits has made another damn fine post well worth the time it takes to read. Do yourself a favor, check it out.
31 Ways to Motivate Yourself to Exercise
My personal favorite points are:
1- How you feel after a workout. I always feel great after a good workout. It’s a high. And I let that motivate me the next time: “You know how good you’re going to feel, Leo!”
4 - Having fun. Exercise should be fun. If it isn’t, try a different kind of activity that you enjoy. As long as you’re moving, it’s good for you.
9 - Success stories. I find the success stories of others incredibly inspirational. If a fitness website has success stories, I’ll almost always read them.
14 - Adrenaline rush. I get a rush when I exercise. Ride that rush to complete the workout.
15 - Stress relief. Wound up after a long day at the office? Get out and work off that stress. It makes a world of difference.
and, 26 - Reaching a goal. Set a goal for weight, or your waist measurement, or a number of days to work out, or a number of miles to run this week. Setting and tracking a goal helps motivate you to complete that goal. Make it easily achievable.
I think the last one is key. When I was at my Gym learning Olympic Power Lifting I was focused, intent, motivated and successful at every workout. Even the ones where I started out tired or unsettled garnered great results. When my coach, Jim Schmitz had a falling out with the gyms co-owner and was forced to move his operation to a locale I could not reach within my schedule constraints, my time at the gym became next to useless. I had built in a number of goals around that style of lifting, and when they were no longer achievable my routine fell apart. Goals are essential in all areas of life, but in maintaining an exercise routine they become exceptionally
critical.
Set goals, kick butt, take names! 
I’ve come a fair distance in recovering my physical health and fitness over the last sixteen years. Down from a scale weight of 396 pounds to 190, give or take a five pound swing. My resting heart rate ha gone from 125 beats per minute to 52. My blood pressure has gone from through the roof to text book perfect. I’ve gone from huffing wind after waddling to the refrigerator and back to enjoying fast pace jaunts of a mile without breaking a sweat. Life has gotten better. And, all that has taken a lot of hard work.
My mother, bless her, is not in the best of health. She is grappling with obesity, very bad knees, and suffered a massive heart attack about two years back. She needs a walker if she is going to go very far, and stairs are a big challenge. She spends a lot of time sitting and watching television. She is living an unhealthy lifestyle and knows it. There’s the rub.
My mother is a very smart woman, with a degree in nursing and a long career of psych nursing behind her. She put in twenty years at the Veterans Administration hospital, and was a rock star of a group therapist. She is no dummy. She knows better than to leave her body in its current condition, and she knows that she knows it. Still, she is not taking action and she laments that.
I was visiting with her the other day and we were discussing these very issues. The problem comes down to feeling too uncomfortable in her body to do anything about it.
That’s the break point.
The Chinese have a saying in the Kung Fu circles, “You have to be ready to eat bitter.” That phrase helped me a great deal in the early years of my martial arts training as a morbidly obese man. It still helps.
If you are living in a discomforting physical level of health, the only way out is with more discomfort. Exercise is not easy. It is work. The pay off is a more comfortable existence, but the road there is not.
The American phrase for this is, “No Pain, no Gain.” That doesn’t quite work for me as well as the Chinese saying above. “No Pain, no Gain”, as I have often heard it used, seems to imply that you must suffer. Suffering comes from thinking that things should be other than they are. The Chinese sentiment is more like taking medicine. It may be unpleasant, but it’s good for you.
It takes time to live a life of only lazy comfort to get your body to the point where life itself is discomforting. It will take time, and discomfort to get out. Learn to value discomfort and live a life free from suffering.
When I was 21, I weighed 396 pounds. Today, at 37, I float around 190. It’s been a long, strange trip. I have tried a plethora of weight loss methods, schemes, tricks and regimes along the way. None of them were “it”. They all worked for a time, and then didn’t. This experience is not true for everyone who has battled the bulge, but for me it is. Some folks get on a diet that absolutely does do the trick, they take off the weight and keep it off. But, for the vast majority of warriors of the waistline, that is not the case.
I have tried Weight Watchers, Slim Fast, liquid diets, fasting, Body for Life, Jenny Craig, cheat days, grazing, paleolithic diets, The Zone, The T-Factor, huge water intake, journaling and one meal a day. I have exercised to the point of heat stroke, and sat on my backside. I have been through periods of giving up sugars, flours, processed food, meat, sex and sleep. I have taken phen-phen, phen-free, anabolic boosters, mega doses of flax oil, protein shakes, performance snacks, weight-loss bars, and amino acids. I have read over a hundred fitness/diet books, read thousands of websites, and been an active member of dozens of online forums and support groups. I’ve studied martial arts, cooked all my own food, lifted weights, been through three professional trainers, run, done massive cardio, worked with one of the best Olympic Power Lifting coaches of all time, spent hours and hours in saunas, meditated, and practiced a large number of calisthenic/body-weight routines. I’ve done a lot. I stopped short of surgical intervention, but I did consider it for a long time.
I have yo-yo’d my fair share up and down the scale. I managed to never pop back up past my top weight, but my progress on paper looks a hell of a lot more like a terrifying, vomit-inducing roller coaster ride than a ski slope. Most recently I went down to 185 and popped back up to 270. I’ve been on the down slope since. Keep your fingers crossed.
So, what have I learned? What method works? You might not like it.
There is no magic bullet, no secret. No guarantees. The only absolutely, for certain thing is this - if you want to lose weight and keep it off, you have to do it. No one can say anything to you, or show you anything, or give you anything that will make one bit of difference. You must make the effort. You must do the work. Sorry.
The plan I have come to is this -
That is my patented four point pan for better fitness, weight loss, weight management and healthy living.
Let’s look at each point, shall we?
And, to touch back on the key that unlocks it all -
Let me know how you do.
The best results in my life, for achieving worth while goals, have all come from making something a daily practice. When I first woke up to the fact that I had made myself morbidly obese, I weighed 396 pounds at the age of 21, the thing that saved me was committing to a daily practice of writing down everything I ate and doing T’ai Chi Chih. I made the commitment to do these two things for 1,000 days. Finishing that thousand days made a fundamental change in my life, gave me a craving for physical fitness and helped me to shed the first one hundred of the excess pounds I carried. I also reclaimed my body, cleared an infection in my foot that had persisted for seven years and five operations, and gained a much larger engagement with life.
My struggles with weight continued, but in general got better. When I started Aikido I learned there was a program for living at the dojo, this is called being an Uchi-Deshi (disciple in the house) in Japanese. A year and a half later I moved in. That required a minimum of a one year commitment. I let my Sensei know that I wanted to stay until I had my shodan (first degree black belt.) I ended up taking my black belt exam after one twenty months. My Sensei asked me about staying for an extra year to focus on teaching, and I decided to do that. Midway through the first year, through a mistake on my part, the requirement for Uchi-Deshi was changed from ten classes a week to twelve, with the additional requirement of making at least one class every day. So, once again I found myself having a daily practice. When I was training ten classes a week, and taking the weekends off, I was making very good progress. But, the simple shift to training everyday made a quantum leap in my progress. It was not quite like a rocket ride into the upper reaches of Aikido Mastery, nothing of the sort, but the difference it did make was nearly immediate, and very obvious to everyone I trained with.
By the time I was done with my term as Uchi-Deshi I was down to 185 pounds. My practice slacked off a bit, I only attended the dojo five days a week, and the weight began to come back on. Two years ago I was back up to 260. I got strict with my diet again, and the scale crept slowly back down, but I could feel myself losing the struggle. It was time for another commitment. I cut out all snacking and eat only three meals a day now. Plus, I cut out all sugar based foods - cakes, cookies, candies, confections, deserts. And, I identified two trigger foods that I no longer eat: Pizza and Peanut Butter. I have not set any time frame on this way of eating, I simply make it a daily practice. This is how I have eaten for the last two years, and am back down to 190. The great thing about this practice is that I don’t have to consider the future, or the past, this is just how I am for this day.
Most recently I have re-taken a meditation practice into my life (along with my wife). And, you guessed it, it’s daily. I’ve been at it for about four weeks now, nothing earth shattering to report yet, other than the few things I have already blogged about, but it does feel a lot deeper than just meditating once in a while when the need/mood strikes me. I look forward to a good report in a year, or two.