I have been using the pedometer (Slight chuckle to myself') for the last few days and have managed to clock up an extra 9 points and as these last for a week, perhaps I may just save them up for a 3am maccers run.... but then again maybe not. Even though I could use them for food it may be best just to keep them to the side and use them as a sort of record for my activity level for the week and just try and better it next week. I'll see what the craving monster thinks later in the week. Besides if I stick to the plan and not have the BIG bags of potato chips then I actually have trouble using the points I'm allocated.
I've started reading the biography on Steve Jobs, the re-inventor of the portable music player, Macintosh, cellphone and all those other great Apple products we can't seem to live without. So not only am I eating tonnes of apples now I'm bloody reading about them too Anyway... the first few chapters are about him growing up and going to school and just where and when he found his passion to be electronics. While reading I thought it sounded all a little to familair and then remembered a speech he gave at some college last year that was on the news the day he died, so I went looking for it. Found it on Youtube and watched it again and one part of it resonated with me and that part is when he retold the story of when he was 17, using a quote he read as the main point. It went something like this :
“If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right”
It made an impression on him, so each day he woke up and asked himself, if today was the last day of his life would he want to do what he was about to do today. When the answer was no for more than a few days in a row he knew that a change was needed.
Remembering you’ll be dead soon. That is the biggest tool you’ll ever encounter and it will help you make the big choices in life.
That big choice for me would have to be potato chips.
Now some people will be thinking..."What the hell are you smoking?" and other will be thinking..."I see where you're going with this"
Now I'm not comparing myself to Steve Jobs.... that man is richer than God and Bill Gates put together and well frankly dead as well, something else I am not. I'm not some electronics genius who can see the possibilities of an everyday object and find a way to make it better. I can however understand the process he went through. For quite some time I was constantly proud of my "muffin tops" and banana loaf that was starting to protrude from where my ab's used to be and would at times quite joyously (if thats a real word) exclaim that to people, after all, ALL men go through the middle aged spread, but I'm not quite at middle age yet, well I bloody better not be. But one morning I decided a change needed to happen, I'd had enough. If I was to continue on the path I was on then yes one day I would die and most likely sooner than I would have liked and most likely from either a heart attack or a stroke. Whichever came first. I hadn't been to the doctor in about two years and I knew what he would have said (I could already see the white circles forming around my eyeballs, a surefire sign of high cholesterol, and not the good cholesterol either) and I wasn't prepared mentally for that talk just yet. A very good friend was a weight watchers leader and we had discussed me joining on the odd occassion and I'd kind of half heartedly laughed at the thought. But now as the weight starts to decrease and the rings start to disappear, I can see the benefits.
So in a way as Jobs would put it... it's all about connecting the dots.
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