GIGO is an acronym that was often used in the computing world years ago; it stands for Garbage In, Garbage Out — essentially, give a computer garbage data, and in return, the information it produces will also be garbage. The same holds true for our bodies.

Put garbage into them, and you can expect no less than garbage out. You can’t expect positive returns from your body, whether it’s in the form of better health, weight loss, improvement in muscle tone, if you aren’t willing to put in the work necessary for the outcome you want. Sure, there are short cuts, but they’re never long lasting; success comes with work.

I have to remind myself of this constantly. Recently, I’ve failed at drinking enough water; while I did manage a loss last week, that doesn’t mean that I necessarily did everything right to arrive at that loss — or that I might not have experienced better loss in previous weeks if I’d just stuck to my own tenet of making sure I follow basic rules with my weight loss.

Those rules include eating the right way for my body, drinking enough water, taking my vitamins and medications correctly, and getting enough sleep. (An aside: I am a big believer in exercise; if you’ve happened on to this blog and think “oh, yay, someone losing weight and it doesn’t include pesky exercise!”, think again. It’s just currently not part of my regimen.) If I don’t follow those basic rules, I might see some improvements, but I feel better and function better (and lose weight better!) when I’m consistently doing all of those things. I might be able to get along for a while without drinking enough water or ignoring those vitamins, but not forever.

In short: if I’m not willing to do the right things, I can’t respect good results.

I have no loss to report, this week, but you likely already figured that out: if there’s no photo with the blog, there’s no weight loss. I’m close, but not close enough. While I’m on Day 5 of doing everything right, my biggest problems are on the weekends; the facts are, I don’t like to drink a ton of water. It’s 13 degrees out this morning, and the least appealing thing I can think of, with a body that runs on the cold side to begin with, is to drink cold water… 170 ounces of it. By the way, a gallon of water is 128 ounces, so yes, I drink well over a gallon a day.

In the grand scheme of things, drinking water is one of the easiest things you can do to aid in weight loss. It’s not hard to come by; it’s very inexpensive; it’s simple to do. It doesn’t require special equipment. People don’t even think you’re weird if you’re drinking water — it’s socially acceptable. And yet, when the weekend comes, the last thing I want to keep track of is how much water I’m drinking, which is absolutely silly.

The same holds true for things like taking vitamins, supplements, and medications correctly. By correctly, I mean following the recommendations for taking them. An example would be one of my thyroid medications that should be taken 30 to 60 minutes before a meal. That helps with absorption. But so often, in the past, I’ve taken it with a meal — which likely means I wasn’t getting the full benefit of that dose. There are some vitamins that shouldn’t be taken in close proximity to certain medications; and while it might seem an inconvenience to work out the timing of these things, that’s really all it is — an inconvenience.

Letting incredibly simple things hold me back from progress because they’re inconvenient is, well, stupid. There are certainly much more difficult challenges to weight loss that are ahead; mastery of the easy things must be in place before those challenges come.

Start by doing the simplest of things right.