Category Archives: Fitness

6 ways of losing weight mentally

October 26, 2014 Dinkrit Sethi Leave a comment

Losing weight has become the “going to the mall” , “eating a pizza” , “guzzling the cola” of the 21st century, everybody wants to do it. It took a lot of hard work for our race to get to this point, making losing fat a worldwide trend. Almost everybody is looking for shortcuts to shed off those extra kilos once they have eaten their way to bellyland. And almost everyone is looking for the quickest and least discomforting way of getting back the body they had before a mix of tempting food and laziness obstructed their mirrors.

Just some regular moderation would have helped you avoid your current state of depressive desperation.By ignoring the necessary for a long enough period of time, you not only make yourself susceptible to long term damage, but also indulge in short term remedies, which are all the more dangerous. A balanced lifestyle and preventive healthcare methodologies would have saved you from all the personal trainers, weight control diets, fat loss supplementation and other fitness activities requiring you to sacrifice your daily routines.

The short cut myth

But now you are desperately looking for that secret mantra or enchanted elixir which will make you lose weight faster. A way to lose weight with minimal possible effort in the shortest of time frame. Remember, that it took you years and years of unhealthy practices to reach your present state of being, hence it is not possible to get back to being healthy in a very short period of time. Although you might be able to lose a few pounds following strict diets and bone jarring workout routines, you wont be able to sustain the effort for too long, failing which, you will plunge deeper into ill health.

Recounting past mistakes might overload you with misery but hindsight educates you on your mistakes.It is important to understand that good health is not a matter of a few months of rigorous training or a week long diet, it is a discipline, which should be practiced daily in all aspects of life. If you are too lazy to do basic exercises and too carefree to refrain from excessive indulgences, then you open the door to fat, ill health and chronic diseases. With this being said, the easiest way to lose weight is by not letting yourself gain it in the first place. Try to balance your diet and do some sort of a workout daily, without expecting any gifts for it.

The mental weight loss

Now for the ones who find themselves helplessly fat and in need of sudden transformation, it is to be understood that fat loss actually begins with the brain. The body might help you achieve your goals, but the energy to relentlessly pursue your dream of looking and feeling better comes from within. Here are 6 ways which would help you mold your thought process and achieve all your weight loss goals:

1. Overcome petty temptations– The desire to over eat just to please your tongue, or smoke death to suffocate your lungs. Seeking to drown reality with needless food and intoxicating drinks, all these petty temptations prevent you from acting till you reach the brink. It is easy to shed responsibility but most difficult to be responsible. If you manage to control giving in to your petty desires you go a long way towards shedding weight and all your troubles too.

2. Destroy laziness– Laziness is the tallest mountain between you and what you want to do. It is vital to recognize it as it hides behind a million excuses, things which appear to suddenly become more important than your attempts at losing weight. Laziness should be drenched in an ice bucket as soon as it makes its presence felt. You should recognize that the biggest enemy of your weight loss regime lies between your own to ears, but you can make this enemy your biggest ally if you learn to control it.

3. Optimize effort– Punching a wall doesn’t make you Mike Tyson, singing in your bathroom doesn’t make you Frank Sinatara and playing Temple Run wont make you Usain bolt. If you want to achieve anything you have to optimize your efforts, same is the case with weight loss. Don’t be too dependent on someone else to help you at all times, seek advise not dependency. You know yourself the best so it should be you who should be making your weight loss programs and diet charts by collecting genuine advises, researching the internet and making gurus rather than hiring personal trainers.

4. Nurture Optimism– You should believe that whatever you are doing, as insignificant as it might appear, is helping you in a way. The muscle mind complex is such that if you don’t believe in your efforts, you don’t see any results, get disheartened and then quit completely. Read about and watch other people making their dreams come true, this will help you inspire yourself and others by creating an environment of optimism.

5. Sustaining effort– Any purpose if pursued by the will of accomplishing a certian objective becomes purposeless when the objective is achieved. Similarly if you manage to lose all the weight you wanted, you will most certainly put it all and more back on, if you don’t continue your efforts. Hence, the will to compete against oneself should be sustained till the end of time.

6. Desire, Dedication and determination– You need to build a pit-less reserve of desire to be willing to do anything to achieve your goal, dedication to overcome petty temptations and determination to keep going even when you don’t feel things are working.

If you dig deep down, you will find all the energy and enthusiasm you need to transform yourself into a better form. Yet you should understand, that all the things preventing you from doing this lie inside you too. You got to learn to suppress these feelings in order to give room to something more positive to take their place.

Have a good day.

Fitness, Wellness

Don’t surrender to pain

October 8, 2014 Dinkrit Sethi Leave a comment

Time has softened our race. Spoilt by luxuries, incapacitated by comforts, our threshold for pain has diminished considerably. Gone are the days of hard work and resilience, the modern era is all about quitting too soon and taking the shortest route. Your fear of getting hurt overrules all your dreams and aspirations. Pain is what you want to avoid at all cost, be it physical or psychological. And when the going gets tough, you surrender.

Pain, as uncomfortable it might be, is an essential precursor to growth. If you endure it, you become eligible for all the pleasures life has in store for you, if you surrender, you are devoid of all these joys.

Surrendering as a Habit

When you surrender you not only lose immediately but leave a gateway for yourself to surrender when pain comes your way again. If you come across extremities again, your conditioned mind recalls its previous disposition towards pain and knows that it can choose to quit, and it most definitely does.

Surprisingly you are conditioned to surrender since childhood. Excessive paternal love gets you everything without much of an effort. A child knows that his gateway to the pleasures of life is through crocodile tears. So he never attempts to make an effort and resorts to crying at every possible obstacle he faces. This becomes an acquired characteristic. Although its odd seeing a grown up cry but his molded instincts don’t allow him to push beyond his limited scope. The scope which was defined in his childhood.

The absurdities of pain

You might try to run from it, but pain will catch you in one way or the other. So why delay suffering for a later day? Why lead a life of fear? Why not understand the varied forms of pain and not surrender to them?

Here are the absurd forms that pain takes up:

1. Pain in the form of mental stress and fatigue– Mental pain comes in the form of stress. Focusing on a particular task for too long puts you under a lot of stress and leads to cognitive fatigue. The ones who surrender to this mental stress end up with normal lives, the ones who endure are the ones who become great eventually.

2. Pain while pursuing healthy ambitions– While working on your fitness goals you face both mental and physical pain. If you manage to overcome both consistently, you surpass your expectations. Usually you don’t go beyond the threshold of pain and workout within your comfort zone. Obviously you see negligible results, and seeing this you quit.This is why all fitness plans which don’t involve progressive overload( doing better than what you did yesterday) fail. Pain should be well accepted if you want any kind of improvement in your health.

3. Pain that comes from resisting temptation- Sacrificing superficial pleasures, like watching tv, junk food, smoking, drinking and social media takes a lot of effort and will power. A condition where you have to force yourself away from the things you like. This is associated with a mental pain. We know excessive indulgences are harmful for us but we surrender to the pain that we feel when we let them go. Hence all our promises and resolutions go to waste.

4. Pain arising from social discomfort– What people say can really hurt you and make you change your views about life. But if you surrender to the pain they which comes out of social skepticism, you will never be able to accomplish what you are meant to. If you are willing to bare all the pain and abuse which the critics throw your way, and still follow the path you have chosen, you are bound for glory.

Why not fight the demon today than give it time to get big on you?

Remember, you are not defeated until you surrender, you stand an equal chance until you quit. How you respond to pain determines how far you can push yourself, how far you push yourself defines how great you become.

You just need to control the remote of your life and mute the voices in your head telling you to take the easier path. You need to channel your thoughts and be resilient at the most testing of times. If you manage to control pain and learn to live with it, you might lose a battle or two, but never be defeated.

This is not a one time fight but it will last you a life time, you better be prepared to fight back every time pain strikes, and try to kill pain before it kills you.

Have a good day.

Fitness

Overcoming common fitness myths

October 4, 2014 Dinkrit Sethi Leave a comment

The new born fitness freaks tend to come across many fitness myths. The wide array of these fitness myths tend to misguide people on their pursuit of fitness. They often become a little too greedy and start expecting a lot in a short period of time, This leads many people into the path of over training and unwanted supplementation.

Over-training- How much is too much?

I see most new enthusiasts at the fitness center trying a little too hard. They sacrifice their posture because they want to lift extra weights. This might make your muscles swell temporarily for the Instapic of the day, but it is damaging in the long run. You might get a good momentary pump out of it but it leads to long term injuries (quite the opposite of what you get into the fitness regime for).

Your innate instinct of competition might compel you to lift more weight than the others, but you must not sacrifice your posture for it. Study and apply proper form while performing exercises and gradually increase the weight when you are fully confident of maintaining it for all the repetitions.

Persistence and patience are important characteristics of every health related endeavor. You only see the muscular bodies and heavy weights that someone manages to lift, but ignore the hard work sacrifice they have made to achieve it.

You cannot learn to be the fastest sprinter in a day or the fastest swimmer in a week, what takes time, takes time. Don’t expect miracles by over punishing yourself. Every individual has a unique genetic make up and body function. The way they respond to different exercise and nutrition varies, hence you cant compare yourself with anyone else.

Only compete with yourself, and try to improve every day. Keep in mind good posture is paramount, and persistence always pays.

The truth about supplementation

Supplementation and nutrition is mostly misunderstood. Improper counselling, aggressive product marketing and demand for a short cut approach are the biggest contributors to this confusion. It is to be understood that you cant just supplement your way to a better body. There are no shortcuts. You might get tempted to try steroids, fat burners etc, but remember what grows fast, goes fast.

Rather than being dependent on supplements from the on set, it is advisable to give your body the freedom to express itself fully before going in for something extra. Once you think that your body has reached its absolute limit with a normal diet, only then go in for whey proteins and other supplements.

Even then it is advisable to research thoroughly before choosing a supplement. As every individual has a specific system the same supplements and even foods would effect them differently. For eg. someone might be lactose intolerant while for others milk would work like an elixir.

Stick to the basics

If you manage to control the desire to show off and keep your expectations in check, you would go a long way in surpassing your health expectations. One way of doing this is sticking to the basics. A balanced diet, proper sleep and well postured workout is the key. Be dedicated, be patient and sacrifice short term pleasures like taste for a better mind and body.

Don’t get influenced by the people around you or the ones trying to sell you things. It is not important for you to be the one lifting the most weights in the gym. What is more important is to lift with the best form. Similarly it is not essential for you to run 10 miles a day, just find your limits and go a step further the next day.

The easiest way of getting better with your pursuit of fitness is by beating your personal best every week. This can include lifting 5 pounds more in the next set, one extra rep of the pull or push up everyday, or simply running 1 km more than the previous week. Improvement can only be assessed against one self. This gives you the best idea of your progress and helps you enhance yourself infinitely.

Devote yourself to the discipline and find a guru

Fitness rather than being a modern day trend is more of a discipline. It requires all the attributes that one needs while pursuing a new branch of knowledge. You have to respect the discipline and devote yourself fully in order to reap maximum benefits. Hence short cuts and cheating go out of the window. Also it is very essential to discover a guru.

These people are not that difficult to find. They outshine the others, not by virtue of words or marketing schemes but by their demeanor. They don’t advertise themselves because they don’t need what you have, they only want your betterment.

A guru will always leads by example. He would practice what he preaches, so he would never have a big belly. He would push you beyond what you believe you are capable of. He would offer customized solutions to your generic problems, He would help you even he doesn’t get anything out of it. Don’t be shy when you are lucky enough to meet someone like this. Seek their assistance and I am sure they will be happy to help. Gurus know that knowledge is a waste if it is not shared. They will share their experiences and help you overcome other fitness myths as well.

Break the bubble

A mixture of partial knowledge and public opinion puts you in a bubble. You tend to start believing things that aren’t actually true. You need to garner more knowledge from credible resources and believe in yourself. This would enable you to break the bubble of fitness myths.

Just try to get better every day and give it your all. If you manage to persist for long enough you would surprise yourself with the progress that you make.

6 ways to everything, Fitness, Wellness

Some food for thought – 6 ways to a happetite

September 17, 2014 Dinkrit Sethi Leave a comment

What you eat not only determines what you look like but it also conveys a lot about your persona. Till a certain age you don’t get to decide what you eat. So you eat what is served.

Then,after a certain age, when you get the opportunity to consciously decide what to eat, you avoid it. Partly because you think its just food so why waste time, partly because you don’t want to go against the normal pattern of the household and partly because you think its all about instant gratification of the taste buds.

Either you completely ignore what you are eating or base your eating decisions on taste. The former displays your ignorance and the latter your stupidity.

Soon comes a time when you suffer as a result of your ignorance and stupidity. Due to your lack of responsible eating you are recommended to forego major portions of your diet. Then starts a long trend of regular vacations in the hospital, expensive tour guides in white coats and a staple diet of taste bud traumatizing medicines. And we are happy to partake in the precautionary procedures. The ones we led ourselves to.

Our generations has an affinity towards responsive action rather than preventive ones. You only look for drastic cures, once something drastic happens, rather than making a little effort to prevent them.

What you eat reveals a lot about your personality. Your lack of decision making, irresponsibility, lazy-ness, and lack of self control all become evident by your eating habits.

But luckily its never too late to make a change. Here are some tips on how to enhance your lives through proper nutrition, in the quickest way possible. These are the 6 ways to a happetite:

1. Proper proportioning

Frühstücken wie ein kaiser,. Mittagessen wie ein könig und abendessen wie ein bettelMann.

This German saying is ideal for someone starting off with diet control. Eat your breakfast like an emperor, your lunch like a king and your dinner like a beggar.

You don’t have to wear a crown through breakfast or go on the streets for dinner. What this implies is that you should proportion your meals properly. Breakfast should be the heaviest meal of the day and dinner the lightest. Something we all know but never apply. Oats, nuts, milk, eggs, fruits, cottage cheese, wheat bread, curd are some good alternatives for breakfast.

2. The tongue is too small an organ to base your entire appetite on– Fries, bacon,cheese, pizzas, chips, burgers always test your resolve. You just cant get a hold of your tongue. You give excuses to yourself, YOLO,POLO and what not to justify your bad eating habits. But when you end up in the operation theater 10 years down the line, you will understand that all your excuses sum up to nothing. A little moderation can help you avoid enormous pain and permanent damage to your health and appetite.

3. Healthy can be tasty too- We mostly avoid healthy eating because of the myth that it is bland and tasteless. But with an ounce of creativity and some research you can add flavor to the healthiest of foods.

4. Balance and not austerity– A balanced diet allows you to satisfy all the senses. The extremely austere ones which are available all over are difficult to follow and impossible to sustain. You might cut everything from your diet for a month and see yourself losing weight but then next month you will end up weighing double. Setting impossible targets and following strict diets is like pouring ice over someone having diarrhea. It will only worsen the situation.

5. Patience– The state you find yourselves in now is a consequence of years of unhealthy eating. You can expect to cure it in a months time. Patience is a virtue you would need most. Starting with spending time while eating, to sustaining your diet for long enough for it to have an effect, Don’t get disheartened if you don’t see immediate results, there are no quick fixes and the ones offering these are lying.

6. Small sacrifices now prevent big ones later– Subtle changes to your diet now will prevent dramatic alterations later. If you can control the urges compelling you to indulge in taste based eating, you will go a long way in being free to chose what you eat in the long run. Don’t overdo indulgences, that’s how you would be able to enjoy them throughout life.

Greatness is not defined by a single moment, it is the consequence of a way of life. What you eat is a significant component of your way of life. It wont take too much for you to live a life of greatness. Overcoming minor urges is too trivial a sacrifice in your pursuit of greatness. Love yourself enough to know and make the difference.

Have a Good Day!!!

Fitness, Wellness

Chasing dreams

September 2, 2014 Dinkrit Sethi Leave a comment

In your quest for immortality

I live my life to be immortal, not that I want to live forever in this physical form, but as part of someone else’s thought.

You aren’t immortalized by the money that we leave behind in our accounts, neither by the fancy cars and houses we make for ourselves. These evanesce just like everything tangible. You aren’t etched into the stone of eternity by living a settled stable life, anyone willing to lower his demands is capable of doing that.

Everyone who has ever been of any consequence has had one unique ability. They have had the same body, brain and 24 hours in the day, but this one quality has made them stand out from the rest. This attribute has made their stories immortal and their names legendary. Everyone can, but only few understand what this hallmark for greatness is.

The relentlessness behind the rewards

Usually people only celebrate consequences of the lives that legends lived, they are mostly remembered for the inventions they made, the battles they won, the mountains they climbed, the books they wrote and the hearts they touched.

But all these consequences are a result of how relentlessly they pursued their dreams throughout their lives, the abundance of fortitude they displayed while chasing their aspirations. The strength of purpose in their dreams gave them the energy to keep trying repetitively, till they start taking failure nonchalantly. They weren’t afraid of failing hence they eventually succeeded.

They dint have a magical genetic function, no one does. They faced the same daily struggles that any ordinary person does. But they were set apart from the crowd in two ways. Firstly they dared to dream, yes most of us are too good at building castles in the air. Secondly and more importantly, they were so captivated by their own dreams that they pursued them with an obstinate mindset. Their mesmeric devotion towards fulfilling these dreams auto- aligned the universe in their favor.

Chase your dreams

Dare to dream, its the most obvious thing to do, dedicate yourself wholly to its fulfillment and providence will move. Your resolve is stronger than what you think of it to be.

The world is too preoccupied in transferring today’s joy to tomorrow in their struggle for stability. They are unaware of what independent dreaming is, as they are busy fulfilling the dreams of others. As explored in Are you in shape or just stable? people don’t want to be in shape as they chase this elusive stability like a zombie.

Social conundrums defeat us when we try to dream, resistance prevents us from persisting after the first failure and your closest associates demoralize because they themselves have no clue. It seems like the universe conspires against letting you chase your dreams, well it only gives you what you actually want. Its up to you to listen to the resistance inside you and the critics outside. Remember that you give them the voice that they have.

First they will try to stop you, then laugh at you, then be jealous, then applaud you and finally follow you.

THE URBAN YOGI