Tom's Blog

Some of you know that a couple of years ago I lost a serious amount of weight. I went from 212 lbs to 172 lbs. It's never an easy task to lose 40 pounds, but especially not when you are in your late 40's. Yes, it took a lot of will and determination, but it took one more thing - Accountability. I had to be accountable to someone. I chose my son, who was also trying to lose some weight.

At the time, I vowed that I would never gain the weight back and would continue to work on this until I reached my ideal weight according to my doctor - 165 lbs. Well, I stopped being accountable to my son and here I am two years later with what can best be described as "weight creep." My weight is creeping back up. I'm at 177 lbs. as of this morning. But I am determined not to let this get out of hand. So, I am going to be accountable to someone.

This time I am going to be accountable to you, my readers. It's a very scary thing to be accountable. You don't know for sure whether you will be successful. And failing in a public forum such as this blog could be disastrous. But when you really want to be successful. When it's more important to you than any possible embarrassment. That's when you want to be truly accountable.

So, I'm going to be accountable to you. I will share my progress every Monday morning. Of course, I will be measuring my weight on a daily basis. And I don't expect it will go down every day. There are variations such as water retention and muscle growth that can make it go up. But I do expect weekly weight loss.

Along with accounting for my weight to you and measuring it, I need a goal to go along with it. You might think that a specific weight, 165 lbs, might be the goal. But I have found that I need a goal that is more rewarding than just this one number. In this case, I have two goals beyond the weight that require the weight loss to accomplish. The first is a size 32 waist. I have always wanted to fit into a size 32 since I first started putting on weight.

The second goal is to complete an olympic length triathlon in less than 2 1/2 hours. I did my first olympic triathlon this past October and completed it just under 3 hours. So, I have a 1/2 hour to trim off. Since my run was horrible, most of this will come from a reduction of my running time and the rest will have to come from my bike time. My swim time was pretty good and realistically I can probably only shave off a few minutes on my swim time.

I am counting on you, my readers, to hold me to these now very public goals. Let me know what you think and hold me accountable for my results.

You may be wondering what all of this has to do with business and wealth. After all, this is a business and wealth blog, not a health and fitness blog. Stay tuned tomorrow for more. For now, ask yourself this question - ARE YOU ACCOUNTABLE?

Warmest regards,

Tom