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It Was Time To Break Out The Dancewear. The trouble was my shirts didn’t fit!

So, after eighteen months, the dance scene was back open – modern jive, Ceroc, Salsa – it was time to break out the dancewear. And part of the fun of going dancing is getting ready (for me, it is anyway!) and choosing what to wear. Do you remember those days, emptying half your wardrobe onto your bed and agonising over which outfit to wear?  Now that I’m in the second half of my life, I get to do it all again; it’s as if history is repeating itself. I love it!

The trouble is the dressing up part doesn’t like me. My shirts don’t fit! After Eighteen months of being at home with lockdown like so many, I have put on some weight (understatement!) Something needed to change.

My daughter (ever the logical and sensible one) said, “you need to go on a diet, dad!” So, I decided to make a diet plan.

My 10-Step Plan To Address My Dressing Up

  1. Goal: For me, that was to get back into my shirts. In his excellent book ‘Atomic Habits‘, James Clear maintains that to make a habit stick (like a diet), make it visible. So, for example, if you want to eat more fruit, leave it out on the kitchen table; don’t hide it in the fridge (out of sight, out of mind). So, visible for me was hanging my shirts outside the wardrobe, so I see them from the minute I wake up in the morning and the last thing before I go to bed, reinforcing the habit to lose weight to fit into them!
  2. Reality: Where are you now? What have you done so fare? What has worked in the past? What hasn’t worked? What resources do you need – diet, exercise, help
  3. Diet: The best way to do that is with a food app I use, ‘Nutra Check‘; it’s brilliant and has all the major food brands. Choose your menu for Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner, and it will give you the KCAL and FATg of whatever food you enter. The best thing for me is it also has an exercise column even dancing is listed.
  4. Exercise: For me, that is a 2-mile walk each day and dancing a couple of times a week – you have no idea how much weight you can lose when you dance, and it’s a great alternative to a gym. Again, you can download a step tracker on your phone to monitor your progress
  5. Help: Who else needs to be with you to achieve your goal? What support might you need sticking with the diet and the exercise? Do you need to join a group to keep up the motivation, have an exercise buddy.
  6. Outcome: Remember, it’s not about losing the weight. It’s about what losing weight will give you. What would it look and feel like? For me, I do a visualisation exercise wearing my shirts dancing. For you, it could be fitting into your favourite dress, a pair of jeans, looking great in a swimsuit sitting by the pool on holiday. Research has shown the more accurately we can visualise something – using all our senses – the more likely it is to happen.
  7. Tracking: Weigh yourself same time every day or week – there are different schools of thought on this. Get yourself some accurate digital scales. My old mechanical ones were four pounds out (most upsetting). You can update the results to the app and monitor your progress.
  8. Action: Take tiny steps. Acknowledge and reward yourself for milestones reached along the way.
  9. Enjoy: It’s a marathon, not a sprint.
  10. Celebrate your success for achieving your goal.

Conclusion

The app tells me that I will have lost the best part of two stone by February if I keep on track. Now that’s a plan.

You can watch a YouTube clip on Friday dance night here

What Plans Do You Want To Make?

Now that you are in your fifties. Are you feeling “stuck” in your relationship, career, or life itself?

When was the last time you had some fun? Learnt something new? Or just because you could for the hell of it?

What if you were curious enough to find out…

If you like what you hear and want to discover more about how I could help you

Grab yourself a coffee and let’s have a chat. No obligation. If all this call did was to inspire you into action would it be worth it?

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