Kat & Tshepi

Hi There,

Welcome back to Kat & Tshepi blog, we hope your week was fantastic. Our week was great, we managed to stick to our meal plan and training program. We are excited about sticking to our set training program (table below), this was the first time we did so since we began the 6 months’ weight loss and fitness journey a month ago. We really were failing to stay consistent with the training program, so it was a relieve to finally do it as planned (we might need to celebrate this small win 🙂 ). We can attribute the achievement to the will and desire we always had for sticking to our training program, as they say “where there is a will there is a way”, so it happened that we found a way to make it happen this week.

Our food preparation and sticking to our meal plan is still going well, it is starting to become a habit and a part of our routine. In this week, we also improved on tracking our calories, this takes a bit of time in our busy schedule but we managed to log our foods and track our calories on MyfitnessPal App each day of this week, we are happy with this improvement.

DAYS OF THE WEEK	MORNING WORKOUT	EVENING WORKOUT
Monday	Upper Body weight training	Cardio training
Tuesday	Lower body weight training	Rest
Wednesday	Rest	Cardio training
Thursday	Upper Body weight training	Rest
Friday	Stomach/Abs training	Cardio training
Saturday	Full body weight training and Cardio	Rest
Sunday	Rest	Rest

As great as the week was, we however experienced some difficulties with the expectations we have for each other, and unfortunately this happened after a great morning training session. Normally when we get disappointed with each other or when we fail to meet each other’s expectations we isolate from each other and retract to our inner selves (a painful experience 😦 ) and this can take a day or two until we decide to resolve the issue. But somehow this time we found courage to humble our egos, immediately discussed and resolved the issue (We thank God for this courage).

We realized that we set our own expectations on each other and when they don’t happen as planned we get disappointed or get angry at the other person. We acknowledged that we need to accept that it is our own expectations that we set on each other and because we are not in control of the other person, what we expect might or might not happen, and it is okay in either case. It is time for more acceptance and losing the control on others 🙂 ….and the LOVE for the other person is the answer, whether they meet or fail our expectations, our LOVE for them remains and carry us through because LOVE expects nothing in return. This brings us to this week’s topic “Expectations”.

1. Expectations

The word “Expectation” is defined as “A strong belief that something will happen or be the case”. When we have expectations, our beliefs and our standards are strong and high because we deeply desire an ideal outcome, but this is mostly not the case. And when our expectations are not met, it can be a very crushingly painful feeling, it can be an experience that sends us to the dark shadows of disappointment, anger and resentment. This is also the case with weight loss and fitness journey, our expectations can be so strong and of high standards that when we fail we are so crushed that we question our ability and questions whether the journey is worth the trouble. This can be so demotivating and can be a precursor to abandoning the weight loss and fitness journey, especially if it happens often.

The reality is that this happens and will happen a lot on the weight loss and fitness journey. On our own fitness journey, we have experienced a countless failed and unmet expectations, this included failing to meet the weight target after extreme efforts, not looking the way we expected when we reached a certain weight, eating unplanned foods just minutes after we have decided we will eat perfectly on that day. But we managed to stay the course because we have never allowed our failed expectations to have any dent on our ability to reach our goals. When this happens, we really take the pain as a motivation to review our expectations and the process and give it another go.

After failed expectations, we somehow find ourselves loving the process of reviewing our goals, setting new plans and going again. We don’t have any room for despondency and quitting (luckily 🙂 ) but we do have many rooms for adjustments on our expectations. So when it comes to unmet expectations, we can say that, love for the process and making adjustment are key in carrying you through. After all, the efforts for weight loss and fitness are rooted in love for yourself and those around you. LOVE wins.

That’s a wrap for this week’s blog, we are hopeful and expect to stick to our training program in the coming week and to start tracking our progressive resistance, as well as continuing to love the process. Until then, let LOVE rule and stay blessed.

Kat & Tshepi