Book Documentation of Losing Weight and Getting Better at Sports

From a very young age, I have not been the best at sports. In school, I am always the last person to get picked in team sports during PE. I do not find exercise enjoyable which is why I never exercise for fun and is also why my body is always stiff. Despite this, I have always wanted to ‘fix’ my body by becoming healthier and improving my mental health. I am at the point in my life that I want to be able to enjoy countless things and I realize that I would not be able to do that without achieving physical and mental wellbeing. During the start of the pandemic, my intention was to start working on this so that I would get at least one major positive achievement once the pandemic is over. I started by following some workouts that I found on YouTube, but I lost track and motivation after a while until I finally stopped. Aside from that, school work always keeps me busy and tired and there is never enough time for exercises or other activities. Especially during this pandemic, I have not been staying active nor eating healthy food. Food has unfortunately become my only entertainment at home, as I do not eat to merely satisfy my hunger, rather to avoid feeling empty and bored. My learning goal is to lose weight and become better in sports and physical activities. At first, I wanted to create a personal project that would not only benefit me, but others around me. Then I realized that before serving and helping others, it is important that I help myself first. That way, when it is time for me to help others, I will be more ready for all the challenges. I want to make my personal project about this because this is something that I know I have to do for myself. This makes me have no choice but to start, follow through and most importantly finish this project with no excuses. I not only hope to be better at sports, but also a more confident and happier person.

Aside from getting healthier and more physically active, I also intend to emphasize my mental health and gain more confidence and self-esteem with this project. I have never felt confident or happy with my body. In fact, I have always felt insecure about it. Mental health is just as or sometimes even more important than physical health. Being overweight does not just affect how I look, but also how I think. It is not just about how others see me, but more importantly about how I see myself. When I start to feel physically better, I know that I will start to feel mentally better, too.

Product Goal

At the end of this project, I wish to become more physically active, but more importantly mentally healthy. To share all my thoughts, my feelings, my experiences and my overall journey, I will be creating a book as my final product. The book will include the steps and the process I underwent to achieve my body transformation, such as the workout routine, diet, and journals. The book will also show everything that I have done including how I feel before, during and after the process. Although the content of this book will be more qualitative than quantitative, it will be just as important since happiness and self-esteem cannot be measured by numbers.

Reflection

Before starting this project, I was really nervous. I have never been good at anything to do with sports, so I was doubting how I would do. One of my characteristics is that I am an overthinker and all I could think about was just how I would fail this. Having this mindset also made me not like doing it in the beginning as much as I did later on. Again, I have always been incompetent at sports or any physical activities so this was something way out of my comfort zone.

The process of actually doing my project was just a whole mix of emotions. At first I hated it, then I started hating it less and I finally started to enjoy it at the end. I realized that the more you do it, the more you like it, which is something that goes for a lot of other things in life too. Despite this, it did not help the fact that I was not doing so well during the beginning as this is something I am not used to and I am still adjusting to. Once I started getting better at it, I started gaining more confidence and enjoying it. Even now it feels weird to say that I enjoyed it. What made me enjoy it was the sense of achievement. As the saying goes, ‘practice makes perfect’. And then when I got better at it I started to enjoy it because I felt like I could do it.

I feel great after the project. Although it was not perfect and there were some things that I wish I could change or could have done differently, I do feel like I learned a lot from it. The things that I learned from it are things that will be used my whole life. I learnt discipline by managing my time and sticking to a routine. The entire process from doing the workout routine, following the diet as well as creating the final product made me learn to escape the boundaries of my comfort zone. After the project I feel more confident and I feel more accomplished. I am proud of myself for doing this. Choosing to do this project was one of the hardest yet best decisions I have ever made.

Although there were many things that went well, there were also some things I lacked during this project, which was time management. I followed the schedule I made for myself, but there were days that I was too busy or that I simply forgot, especially in working on the actual product or assignments. One of the reasons I chose to do this is because I wanted to be able to stick to something I chose to do and not just leave it a week in. Fully sticking to a routine was hard at first but it became a normalcy at the end and is something I still do today. Obviously there were many physical activities I lacked in the beginning, too.

Some of the things that I did well in, or improved in were mostly at the end. I learned a lot of things that can be seen in the difference between how I was in the beginning and end, which are shown in my journals. I was better at the activities, I had a better mindset, and most of all I was more organized and happy.

Product Evaluation

I strongly feel that I have created a successful product to the highest of my standards. I believe that I have detailed and adequate content in my book, as well as a design that represents the content accurately. In addition, I have experienced substantial physical and mental change as well as an improvement in my sports ability. My major achievement was losing 5kg. I am also able to do sports movements that I was not previously able to.

Despite this, my main weaknesses were that I was not able to allocate and use my time wisely during the beginning of the project. This was because I felt unmotivated and lazy to complete it. Moreover, I feel that I could have added more visuals for my product such as decorations, as well as including more information about the ‘before and after’ the project. I met my goal of losing weight, but not the intended 7kg I was aiming for. I sent out a survey to the people involved in my project so that I could consider their opinion in my final evaluation.