It is a popular urban legend that if you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water it will jump out but if you put that same frog into a pot of cold water and slowly increase the temperature to boiling that the frog will stay in the pot and be boiled to death.
I am that boiled frog.
In Jim Fixx I am Not I wrote about my first day failure at the Couch-to-5k Running Plan. I started with what I thought was a reasonably slow pace but I had to give up after 12.5 minutes. I decided to turn down the heat and start super slow, minimally increasing speed each session. If you follow my cardio page you’ll see that after less than 10 sessions of these slow incremental increases that I am now back at the pace I started with, but now I feel great after 25 minutes and am ready to go faster and farther. The water is almost boiling and I didn’t even notice it.
The first week of my strength training program included 13 total exercises, averaging 30 minutes per day, with a total weight lifted of 63,000 pounds. By slowing turning up the heat I now have 16 total exercises, averaging 40 minutes per day, with a total weight lifted for the week of over 100,000 pounds. I am shooting for getting up to an hour a day, and I’ll do it slowly - like turning up the heat on that fictional frog.
By the end of July my normal lunch at Bruegger’s consisted of 2 salt bagels with jalapeno cream cheese and cucumbers, a bowl of soup with the bagel bite that comes with it, and a large chocolate chip cookie. For the first lunch there on my diet I only had one sandwich instead of two. Then I changed the bowl of soup to a cup of soup. Then I changed the large cookie to a single caramel. Then I eliminated the caramel. Then I eliminated the bagel bite. Before I knew it my lunch went from approximately 1600 calories to 520 calories. And I still feel satisfied after my meal. I don’t think I could have jumped right into the boiling water of a single sandwich and a cup of soup.
Start small and increment slowly and eventually you too can be a boiled frog.
“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” - Lao Tzu.
Frog originally uploaded to Flickr by Maurice Koop. Used under an Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 license.
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