Numbers

There's a girl on Twitter that I don't really know, but I see her Tweets, who must be in some kind of contest or wellness challenge at her work where they have weekly weigh-ins. She's doing great and she posts about it. She also has a coach, who I'm assuming is a trainer, who sets goals with her. This week her goal is 7 pounds! She has lost 17 pounds of her 20 pound goal in 9 weeks.

All of that is really irrelevant, it just made me think about my goals and my training. I've never had an actual number in mind for my goal weight or how much I want to lose.

I think that has helped me. I do like losing pounds, of course, and seeing lower numbers, but I haven't freaked out if numbers go back up again a little sometimes or if they just don't go down at all for weeks in a row. I've actually reached a point, after a year, where I forget to weigh myself in the morning sometimes.

What's interesting to me is that Khris has never asked me how much I weigh or how much I want to lose or if I'm losing. He's never, ever given me a goal of pounds to lose in a week like the trainers do on television. I can't imagine him being disappointed in me for not reaching a pound goal.

Whenever I share with him pictures of my scale and the numbers going down, he is happy for me, but it's because I'm happy. He doesn't really care. He's more interested in how I'm feeling and how I'm doing at the exercises. It makes him happy that it makes me happy to be in smaller sizes, but that's not what he cares about.

Maybe other trainers, or trainers on television focus on that because they know it's what the client wants or because they know it's what other people see and they want people to know they can get results for people so they can get more clients.

Khris wants people to see that I feel better and I walk taller and I have more happiness beaming from me. I don't know if he'd even be able to answer people if they asked him how much I've lost.

185 pounds is a pretty awesome number for me. I know I will lose more eventually, but it's the number that I happened to land on (I didn't choose) that feels pretty great. I wouldn't be more motivated by Khris putting weekly pound goals on me.

On an opposite note, I saw a Tweet from a guy who was frustrated at his perceived "failure" at the gym the last few times because he was recovering from something and he didn't lift some exact number of pounds that he had done before. I didn't pay attention to exactly what he was talking about, but I paid attention to his energy.

He was talking about failure and not going back if he continued to fail and it was all so negative just because he was lifting like 20 pounds less than he usually lifts. Again, those are only numbers. Khris changes my numbers for doing things all the time.

Sometimes I'll do only 3 of something new or kind of heavy and sometimes 10 leg lifts at the beginning of a workout feel totally different than 10 at the end or on a different day.

I usually use the green kettle bell and the other day I used the purple one, which is lighter, because I think he was trying to have me stretch or strengthen my back. None of that is failure.

I understand psyching yourself out. I've done that. But that's part of what blogging is about: getting those lessons fixed up in my head so I don't stay psyched out by the counting.  Mah. Ha. Ha. Ha.