I've in my personal life that for the most part if you have enough goes at it, eventually you succeed. I know this because of several different areas in my life that required me to half multiple attempts before getting to the finished product. The main one left now is related to my health - weight loss.

I've tried to lose weight and on several occasions I've lost significant amounts yet over the years I've still managed to gain the weight back, and worse, add more on. It's at the point now I am really worried I'll die young. Over the last couple months I've tried off and on again to lose weight and I'm basically hovering about 5 kg more than I was this point last year.

I've learned at least what my main problems are, and they're the same too problems I always have no matter the goal I'm trying to achieve. I either get too pumped up and have unrealistic expectations of myself (i.e. lose large amounts of weight in a month) or I immerse myself in the topic and obsess over it day and night for weeks, even months and then as a result I get burned out and lose my motivation regarding it.

So, what happened to my last bout of trying to lose weight? I was not enjoying the workout, I was doing too much for what I can handle given my current fitness level and it was making me hate what I was doing. I decided to dial it right the fuck down this time. There's a gym that's a couple of mins walk about the road, and I've joined it. All I'm doing right now is walking every other day on the treadmill. I set a goal of walking about 3kms (about 2 miles) at a leisurely pace which now takes me about 40mins

At first I was listening to music and walking really fast (doing 3kms closer to 30mins than 40) but I found myself getting bored and not enjoying it. In fact doing my walk last time was such an effort I felt like just calling it a day not even 10mins into it. At that point I realised I needed to do things differently. I needed to slow down so I wasn't feeling so uncomfortable and I needed to do something about the boredom and music was obviously not helping me.

Today when I went, I took longer than I was before (my walk taking me about 40mins as mentioned before) so I wasn't struggling and sweating profusely and also as a change I listened to a debate (Ehrman vs WLC) and I found the experience far more pleasant. I think giving me something interesting to focus on is important, it's probably unconventional but I found I enjoyed myself far more than I did the last few times. I'm just gonna keep on at it till I find something that works for me.

Further to that, I am not trying to walk everyday and not beating myself up if I miss it for a couple of days (I'm trying to go for every second day). I would actually walk more often but aside from my legs aching a bit the next day, I find my inner thighs are raw from rubbing together while walking which actually bothers me more. I found by walking slower as well they're not as bad, but we'll see how that progresses.

Anyways, since I started doing this walking regiment a couple weeks ago I've noticed I have more energy. Most weekends I found that I had little energy to go into town and run errands and just couldn't wait to get home and when I did I'd be exhausted. This weekend though I noticed I was far better in that regards. I did not at all feel depleted and felt it was absolutely ok to go around and walk.

So, goal for this month is simply to keep on doing what I'm doing.