Hi There,
Welcome back and thank you for being with us, we hope you had a lovely week. Our week was good, we were still in celebratory mood over the achievement of the first month’s weight-loss target. But as life would have it, it was not all glorious and perfect as we experienced some challenges and had to reflect on our family life. We had to reflect on our family needs and our own individual needs, we had to figure out how we can improve our efforts in balancing the two. This was in the wake of acknowledging that we spend most of our time doing communal activities and less time doing our own individual activities. We spend most of the time cleaning the house, cooking for the family, helping kids with school work, laundry and ironing and attending to requests from external family members, which leaves little time to spend on our goals, desires and comforts.
Through our reflection, we realized that in a family set-up, there are sacrifices that we need to make for the benefit of the whole family, which means that at times we have to prioritize others and sacrifice our own needs, and doing this with our minds and focus set on the survival and happiness of the whole family. As Aristotle said “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts”, it dawned on us that members of the family makes up the whole family, each member of the family plays their part in the survival and progress of the family, and each member does their part for the benefit of the whole family, which in turn benefits them individually, because when the whole is succeeding, all the parts of the whole are also succeeding. For us then, we acknowledged that in taking care of the needs of other family members (lovingly so, without grudges and grumbles 🙂 ) we are enabling the whole family to be greater and in turn we are individually getting greater. We thank God for this reflection.
This week we were mostly in a happy mood, we were amazed at how the structure that we have set-up for the 6 months’ fitness and weight loss journey and our efforts have enabled us to reach our first month’s target of losing 1kg each, it is working so far. However, in this week we missed a few training sessions due to rain (as we do cardio outdoors) and had religious commitments (it was Ash Wednesday). But we stayed committed to the nutrition plan, we prepared our meals in advance, logged and tracked our calories (we improved here 🙂 ). Even though we celebrated our achievement with some cheat foods, we tried to balance the calorie intake and made sure we did not stray too far from our calorie target. This brings us to this week’s topic of “Celebrating small wins”.
1. Celebrating small wins
Celebrations are joyous, they inspire happiness, they give life a flavor. But as humans, we turn to celebrate only the big stuff, the big wins, the out of the ordinary achievements and we take the small wins for granted, we demote the small wins to ordinary day to day routine completion of tasks. In reality, the great wins are made up of many small wins, as stated by the great writer Paulo Coelho that “The great victory which appears so simple today, was the result of a series of small victories that went unnoticed”. By disregarding the small wins and demoting them to ordinary activities, we deny our lives the flavor of celebration, we deny ourselves the reinforcement provided by our celebrations of achieved goals, we deny ourselves the time to appreciate ourselves and the efforts we have exerted towards our achievements.
Celebration is a reminder of where we come from and where we are going. It boosts moral, self-esteem and self-confidence as it assures and validates our efforts. We have found that when we celebrate small wins we re-ignite the initial spark that led us to start the journey in the first place, we get revitalized to commit and improve on those aspects that requires improvements, the passion of the goal gets reawakened. For us, we celebrate small wins by doing those things we enjoy, and mostly it is the food that we deny ourselves for the sake of achieving our goals such as eating out, enjoying ice cream (Tshepi is guilty of this one 🙂 ) , enjoying baked goods, chocolate, alcohol (this one is for Kat 🙂 ) , all these small celebrations are done with our goal still in mind and therefore we try to have them in moderation (which can be tough). Kat is an optimist in celebrating and can go on forever and ever, but Tshepi is more reserved in celebrating, so in coming together we meet somewhere in the middle for a balanced way to celebrate, this works for us.
This wraps this week’s post , we can conclude that celebrating small wins is one of the ways that we keep our goals alive and to remain consistent, it also takes out the dullness of automatic day to day grinding, and brings energy and life to our efforts, it contributes to the enjoyment of the process. We hope to have many more opportunities to celebrate the small wins on our journey, as we now know that “Success is a series of small victories”. We can see that it will be tough in the coming months to consistently maintain the weight loss momentum, but we are willing and ready to give it a good go. Until then, stay blessed.
Kat & Tshepi
Kat & Tshepi 