Laser Focus Confession – I skipped my anniversary to go to the gym (twice)!

Laser focus is the secret weapon to weight loss success. You have to be fully committed or it just won’t happen! Justin Thacker’s Laser Weight Loss Program gets it’s name from the Laser Focus required! You have to make it your number one priority, not forever, but as long as it takes for you.

There are many, many examples of how laser focused I was when I started the program last summer. I am not necessarily proud of all of these examples, but I don’t regret them either. This was a process and I had to let go of many things to make the space in my life to get fit and happy. It is not as if I made a list of what stays or goes, I just made the overall decision to do it no matter what it takes. Some of your current priorities and obligations can be picked up again once you’ve made the lifestyle changes to achieve your fitness goals and other things that previously seemed important to you, will probably never be missed or revisited.

So confession time, I didn’t make time to celebrate our wedding anniversary last year, in fact I totally blew it off. People get busy, it can happen. Sure, but not to me, the over-the-top celebrator of all occasions big and small. I hate to admit that our wedding anniversary is actually two days (because we got married in France) on the 6th & 7th of Sept., meaning two chances to do something special.  But I wasn’t willing to skip the gym…on either day!

I’ll be even more honest. I didnt really feel like celebrating it anyway. The timing was only a few weeks after I returned from my intensive summer training at The Lab Gym and my husband and I were in the midst of something uncomfortable, unknown and unnamed at the time. I will now refer to it as the beginning stages of “renegotiating our relationship” in the context of my new fitness focused lifestyle. This is absolutely necessary to do in  order to achieve and maintain signignifanct sustainable weight loss. Let me restate the key words here; absolutely, necessary, achieve and maintain.

It might go something like this in your household, spoken or unspoken, “I still love you but I’m not going to sit down on the couch next to you and watch TV tonight or any night in the forseeable future. I’m totally not interested in going out for our usual Friday night pizza and Chianti at our favorite Sicilian place on the corner either. By the way, could you please drop the kids at school so I can workout in the morning because I have an evening meeting”. (The please part may have been omitted too often.)

Will your relationship survive your weight loss effort? It is a good question and hard to predict the answer. Another good question to ask then is, “Can your weight loss effort survive your relationship”?  Your current lifestyle is a significant factor in how you ended up overweight, so maintaining the status quo is not an option. In order to succeed, your will to change has to be stronger than your desire to stay the same to please your partner. If your partner is extremely resistant, resentful or jealous of the changes you are making, you’ve got a rough road ahead of you!! I am no relationship expert, but one suggestion I have to ease the transition is to negotiate up front a period of 60 to 90 days where you announce in advance that you are going to be focused on your health and fitness and you acknowledge that it will take a toll on your partner. At least they will be thinking that their pain and suffering are temporary while you focus on yourself first and ease them into some aspects of your healthy lifestyle more gradually.

Luckily my husband was not so resistant to the changes, but he was having a hard time adjusting to being knocked way down on my priority list; definitely below my workout. I viewed my daily workouts nearly as a matter of life and death, there was no wiggle room. Especially at the beginning, I was determined to solidify the habit…in stone! Cold hard stone!

He was calling me a selfish bitch at least twice a day, and I was being a selfish bitch every day, no doubt. If nobody is commenting about your new found selfishness, you probably haven’t taken your laser focus far enough yet, seriously. Many people who struggle with their weight have a history of putting other people first, if this is you, being selfish is an even more important skill for you to master!

So fast forward one year; this weekend marked our 1o year wedding anniversary and much has changed in the past year aside from me cutting my body fat percentage to less than half of where I started. My husband was actually relatively easy to convert to my way of eating and living and his waistline also shows the benefits of what we refer to as the “collateral damage diet”. No junk food  in the house has done wonders for him. (He loves me more than bread.) We eat together even more often as a family, and obviously healthier meals.

My husband has come to appreciates the positive impact working out has on my mood and stress level and I have become ever so slightly more flexible and considerate when working in my daily trip to the gym. Exercise is more of a priority for both of us now and while he still enjoys running more than anything, he finally got hooked on weights at Justin’s Extrmeme Bootcamp this summer and he now asks to weight train with me. Couples in the gym are one of my pet peeves, so I’ve made an exception doing Bootcamp style training outdoors with him. We squeeze in these workouts at the park while our kids play or during our son’s rugby practice.

Later this week we will celebrate surviving 10 years on a truly over the top trip to Tuscany with a group of friends.  You can be sure you will hear all about the Travel Torture Workouts I have in store for them!

On our anniversary, for the first time in 10 years, I took the long white dress out of my closet. You should have seen the look on my husband’s face when he saw the dress hanging in our room…yikes, what did I have planned? What a relief for him that there will be no reaffirmations or ceremonies of any kind! I was just curious to try it on, and maybe finally take it to the dry cleaners! Ten years and two kids later I can only smile and tell you that it was a couple sizes too big!