On your marks, get set......

My eldest three did their first triathlon this morning. A year ago they heard about it when their friends participated. They decided they'd be there this year...and they have faithfully trained all year long.

Time for Mama to learn a lesson from them.

Time for Mama to look back at something she wrote about EXERCISE over a year ago:

This is fairly simple: you just have to do it!

After having seven children in nine years I was carrying 15kg more than I was happy to. As my seventh approached 12 months of age, I no longer had the excuse that I had just had a baby……and for the first time, we got to a baby’s first birthday without me having the excuse “I’m pregnant again”.
I felt it was time to shed those kilos. I limited my food intake, eating only when I was hungry and only as much as I needed to be satisfied. And I started walking. Every morning except Sunday was the goal. I knew if I told myself four days a week, I’d wake up on Monday already calculating that I didn’t need to get up! Far better to expect to be up at the crack of dawn every day and occasionally need to miss one.

Robert Fritz in his book, “Your Life As Art” gave me the motivation I needed. He wrote something like this: Do you want to be healthy more than you want to stay in bed? I had to ask myself that many mornings! It wasn’t a question of whether I wanted to exercise or not – it was deciding whether slumber was more important! After a series of late nights, sleep sometimes was the greater need, but I then had to start asking myself if I wanted to stay up late more than I wanted good health…
There is no longterm way of getting around the fact that God designed our bodies to need exercise!

Robert Swenson has some excellent guidelines in his book “Margin”, which I read soon after Fritz’s book. In a nutshell his guidelines for physical health go as follows:
Take personal responsibility * Gain physical margin through emotional margin * Change your habits * Value sleep and develop healthy sleep patterns * Have a balanced diet of natural food * Avoid overeating * Drink a lot of water * McStay at home * Exercise for the Heart, Muscles, Flexibility, and Mind and Spirit * Choose what works for you * Stick with it…until the hearse arrives * Be realistic *

It's time to take my own advice. I have had another baby...and I put on weight horrifically while I breastfeed. Three months ago I was 24kg overweight, now I'm 14 - about what I was when I wrote that piece above! Even though I've lost 10kg, I haven't been exercising much to speak of, but I know when I set my mind to do something I can be awfully stubborn and DO IT! I've got the eating bit sorted.....just need to work on getting to bed early and getting up to walk before breakfast. Watch this space;-)