Turkey Trots & Weight Loss

Tomorrow morning will a total role-reversal for me. Instead of racing and having my wife there to cheer me on; I’ll be doing the cheering for her. My wife entered herself in a local 5K Turkey Trot and has spent the past several months preparing for it. And tomorrow morning we get to see the payoff. No matter what, I must say that I am certainly proud. After several failed attempts at weight loss and exercise fads I was pretty skeptical, but she proved me wrong. She actually stuck to it this time, and in the process dropped some weight, which was her ultimate goal.

For this exact reason, this is why I’ve always been a huge proponent of setting non-weight related goals in order to actually lose weight. A great way to lose weight is to make weight loss an indirect benefit of another goal. That’s exactly what I did and I was able to lose 30 pounds over the course of a year. How did I do it? I focused on being fit enough to finish a triathlon, not losing 30 pounds. The great benefit of triathlon training is that is involves preparing for three different disciplines; swimming, biking, and running. For me, that meant I was able to do a variety of workouts, that way I didn’t get bored doing the same thing day in and day out.

While I chose triathlon as my sport of choice, there are many others out there that you may want to take advantage of. However, setting the goal of finishing any type of race will likely yield the same results. Think about it this way: If you set a goal of participating and finishing a race, then you’re locked into at least 5 months of training. This is simply because the race season starts around May. During those five months your workouts will shift from being a “chore” to becoming a habit, and once they become habit, they are much, much easier to maintain. In turn, the likelihood that you’ll loose weight and keep it off increase dramatically.

And the whole, “habit” idea is where my wife is at this point. In fact she’s already searching for races in the spring. Maybe one day I’ll be able to talk her into triathlon!