{"id":1105,"date":"2010-11-01T10:42:31","date_gmt":"2010-11-01T14:42:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jbarrywatts.com\/blog\/?p=1105"},"modified":"2010-10-29T09:44:20","modified_gmt":"2010-10-29T13:44:20","slug":"are-you-trying-too-hard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/old.jbarrywatts.com\/blog\/2010\/11\/01\/are-you-trying-too-hard\/","title":{"rendered":"Are You Trying Too Hard?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Is there any chance you are trying too hard?<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been feeling really exhausted; sorta the &#8220;I&#8217;m kinda worried about me&#8221; kind of exhausted. But suddenly things have changed:<\/p>\n<p>#1. I cut back on my workouts. I&#8217;m doing three days a week, maybe four on a good week, but not trying to hit five days.<\/p>\n<p>#2. I ate some of what I wanted. I actually had a big slab of lasagna on Tuesday evening, and a piece of cake last night. Meanwhile I&#8217;ve also focused a bit more on water intake, replacing a little carb with protein and adding some fruit.<\/p>\n<p>#3. I awakened to the truth that the battles I&#8217;ve been fighting are not against flesh and blood, but against spiritual enemies (as Ephesians 6:12 says&#8212;that&#8217;s a series of blog posts in itself) and must be fought with spiritual weaponry, so I\/we changed our approach to dealing with our problems.<\/p>\n<p>The result? Well, I am sleeping better. When I got on the scale today I was down three pounds. I horsed a good workout this morning, and feel invigorated. My attitude at work has been superb.<\/p>\n<p>My conclusion: I&#8217;d been trying too hard. Trying to push and exercise more. Trying to eat &#8220;by the law of the diet&#8221; instead of giving myself some grace but continuing to be wise. Trying to muscle-up against my problems. I just think I&#8217;ve been trying too hard.<\/p>\n<p>How about you?<\/p>\n<p>In baseball we teach a kid to &#8220;loosen his grip on the bat.&#8221; When he misses a pitch and hears the ump yell &#8220;Strike 1!&#8221; it creates tension, and the natural result of tension is for the hitter to tighten his grip on the bad&#8212;it&#8217;s the physical aspect of his mental resolve to hit the ball. And the result is&#8212;all too often&#8212;that the hitter becomes just a batter who got to hear &#8220;Strike 2!&#8221; and &#8220;Strike 3, yer out!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The lessons are: Loose grip, gentle swing, just make contact with the ball, drink your water, eat your fruits and vegetables, reduce but don&#8217;t eliminate those starches you crave, and get your butt off the couch but don&#8217;t train like you&#8217;re going to be in the next Olympics (it&#8217;s the little 5K Turkey Trot on Thanksgiving morning, silly boy).<\/p>\n<p>Is there any chance you are trying too hard?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Is there any chance you are trying too hard? I&#8217;ve been feeling really exhausted; sorta the &#8220;I&#8217;m kinda worried about me&#8221; kind of exhausted. But suddenly things have changed: #1. I cut back on my workouts. I&#8217;m doing three days a week, maybe four on a good week, but not trying to hit five days. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[33,22,32,15],"class_list":["post-1105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-achievement","tag-balance","tag-high-performance","tag-success"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/old.jbarrywatts.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/old.jbarrywatts.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/old.jbarrywatts.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/old.jbarrywatts.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/old.jbarrywatts.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1105"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/old.jbarrywatts.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1105\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1107,"href":"https:\/\/old.jbarrywatts.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1105\/revisions\/1107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/old.jbarrywatts.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/old.jbarrywatts.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/old.jbarrywatts.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}