Your Lifestyle

Much of The Basic Cycling Course involves you looking inside yourself sincerely. The course is designed to help you adopt the cycling lifestyle. But before you can do that you need to be prepared to want to do just that.

Where are you now?
The first question then must be what is your lifestyle like now and then once that is made explicit, then to ask youself whether you want to change it in any way. You may think you should change your lifestyle, but whether you want to is another matter entirely. And if you think you might, why do you want to change and to what do you want to change. There are a host of questions to answer and think about. Realize, of course, that there are no hard and fast answers to these questions. The next page on the 6-stages change process will help you work through were you.

Stepping back to assess yourself
As is shown in the 6 stage lifestyle change process link here, the first stage is called Pre-contemplation. Many people are at this stage for all sorts of problems they have but are somehow ignoring. They simply do not recognize or want to recognize something about themselves which happens to be problematic.

We simply can not spend every day continually asking ourselves and weighing the pros and cons on whether we should take another action. We have many things to do. So we handle this problem by having routines or habits where we do not question the wisdom of what we do, we just do it. Most of what we do is by habit. And this is appropriate and better than never acting habitually.

But sometimes it is necessary and good thing to occasionally ask oneself whether the habits we have are good ones to continue or not. This first issue to address in this lifestyle assessment process is to prompt you to honestly question of yourself if you like all aspects of your life? It is likely that there will be some things you would find less than ideal, maybe that you do not like at all..

Do you have weight to lose?
PedalOffPounds is obviously dedicated to helping people lose weight through cycling. One first area to consider about yourself is whether you, the reader, are overweight even if only by a few pounds.

But losing weight is not the only benefit to be gained through cycling. Gaining fitness is also an important reason to cycle. In a self examination also consider whether you are as fit as you would like to be?

Being honest in your self-assessment
People use many strategies to defeat being honest with themselves. They sometimes just avoid the topic, or they somehow rationalize away any shortcomings they see in themselves, or they may say that it is not their fault (when it might be) and there is nothing they can do about the shortcoming, or they may even deceive themselves saying that the problem is not so bad as it might first appear.

It can be, in fact, difficult to face an honest assessment if that assessment then implies some difficult course of corrective action. The cycling program of PedalOffPounds, while not effortless, is not so daunting either. One can take up the activity in a very modest way and still achieve significant benefits from it.