To form a new habit is hard, especially a good habit. Because you need to let your body to adapt to a new lifestyle. I think this is very similar compare to changing someone’s mind. Our body does not like us to exercise to burn more calories just like our mind has the bias to give more credibility to the ideas what we believe and less to what we don’t believe. Both our body and mind have are very persistent. In addition, the difficulty to form a new habit depends on the length of the old habit. In the video of backward bicycle, the son learned how to ride a backward bicycle a lot faster compare to the dad. The son only had 2 years of experience of riding bicycle while the dad has eight years.

I successfully completed my challenge this week as I followed the plan that I made last week. However, it is a very bad start. To begin with, the amount of weight of the dumbbell that I once could’ve easily lift is very heavy for me now. I can barely lift half of that amount. Although I know that this is common since I have not work out for awhile. Still, it is very sad that all of that hard work and muscle are lost. After I finished my weight training, I was already exhausted. I had to find a spot in the gym to catch some breath before jumping onto the treadmill.

It is even worse when I started to jog. My breath was heavy and I could hardly move my legs after 5 minutes. Also, doing cardio exercise is extremely boring for me. I can’t stop myself from keep looking at the clock. All I wanted is that time can go faster so I can finish and head home for a shower. Finally, after 30 minutes, I survived. My clothes was full of sweat. Even though this is a very rough start, I believe there is still a lot of room for me to improve and become better and better. For example, I can train at afternoon. I trained in the morning this week and perhaps if I trained at afternoon, I could have more power and energy to complete the training. Therefore, I will be training at afternoon next week to see if there is any improvement.

As the summer is approaching fast, I will not be able to hide my big belly under heavy coats anymore. Therefore, I decided to start losing weight as my personal challenge. Losing weight could be hard if I do not have a good plan and mindset. It is important to set a realistic goal on how much weight to lose per month. Since I only have four weeks, I think losing four kilograms a month seems decent.

I will be exercising at the Uvic’s gym, CARSA, because I still have the membership that I purchased from last year. I plan to exercise at least five times a week and I will be doing both weight training and cardio. I will train each of my muscle groups for a day and following a 30 minutes cardio. Although doing cardio is great when losing weight, it is more important to restrict what I eat daily. As I am 180 cm height and 87 kilograms, I decided to eat at around 1800 calories each day.

Since I used to workout at the gym, I believe that I can catch up this very fast. Because I have already gone through the encoding, consolidation, and retrieval phases of forming mind-muscle connection.