My Journey on the Gym Side

I had a goal to exercise throughout the year and see what would happen if I exercised. I had had similar goals the last two years, and I noticed that my presence in the gym kept improving, i.e., I increased the number of times I went there. If I become demotivated in general life, that tends to make me want to quit the gym.

I learned that motivation is not the primary thing to do. You should take action first, and then motivation comes afterward. You can regenerate motivation; the critical thing is actual action.

I wanted to go to the gym because I tend to sit a lot (I am a software engineer and program a lot), and I started to feel pain in my lower back. I knew this was the result of too much sitting.

Going to the gym and exercising led to no pain in my lower back. Hence, exercises solved one of my problems: back pain. However, the most challenging problem up to date is losing weight.

I started in January and was consistently following a friend’s program. Like in this post, I started weighing roughly 90 kg and am 177cm. I aim to weigh around 80 kg, so I lost 10kg. The only observation has been that I tend to lose weight when I travel to DRC (I am originally from DRC). So, as I was in DRC and came back, I weighed myself and lost about 7kg. Losing weight due to being in DRC leads me to conclude that my primary weight issue is food-related.

By now, I have satisfied two criteria:

1. Setting up a gym schedule and then exercising according to it. The program is a 30-minute exercise on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; it worked great for me cause I shifted my focus from motivation to just action.

2. Find out why I am not losing weight but gaining. This is food-related.

My next goal is to research the best combination of gym and eating, which can make me lose weight instead of flying to DRC and losing it there. I also need to expand on the exercise front to understand which exercise can lead me to lose weight.

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Thank you for reading.