I have been pretty disciplined lately. I go to work, do my job, arrive on time and leave on time. I go to gym after work and then usually home. At home, and after a long day, I regularly make time to read or draw, or even write. Recently, I have also started attending an acting class at the royal film commission for twice a week 6-9 after work and for 6 months. It is a pretty full schedule, one that I enjoy, although I would prefer to have less conventional working hours and more time for my other productive hobbies.

Couple that busy disciplined schedule with a healthy diet. I have been doing pretty well on that side too. I have been health conscience for sometime now but never been successful at reducing my waste size as in recently, when I discovered the harm bread actually inflict on my body. In the past few year, I reduced my sugar intake. Gradually, I started reducing the number of spoons of sugar I add to my daily tea and coffee cups, and eventually I learnt to drink it without sugar. With time, habits becomes norms, and now, I don’t even like the taste of sugar in a tea or coffee cup. In the same way, I have stopped my smoking the shishah habit, which accompanied me for 10 years, and where at the height of it, I used to do it on a daily basis, sometimes even twice a day! Now I have been a non-smoker for 4 years. It hasn’t been easy at the beginning, but slowly I cut it off, and eventually my body started to repulse it. In the same way, I have cut on junk food. Junk food that at one point, few years ago, I used to have it almost on a daily basis, and in which my body fat reached to 25% while doing my regularly sports!

On the sports front, and while it has always been a habit that I followed religiously since my late teenage, I have always fall short of understanding the importance of the cardiovascular activities. Weight lifting has been my main sport activity for years. While it has its own benefits, it has never helped me achieve the desired waste size. Not until I started doing cardio, cutting on fast food, and then cutting on bread, that I saw a significant improvement. My body fat went down from 25% few years ago to 20% two months ago, and a huge drop to 15% now with the cut of bread! It is true when they say that we are what we eat. For cutting bread was like magic to me. Many years of sports didnt weight as much as of the bread in my attempt to reduce my body fat and waste size!

In the past two years, I have also been pretty disciplined on the writing front. Writing a novel is not an easy task, and while my soon-to-get-published novel (3aroos 3amman) is kind of a short novel, but it took me 1.5 years to finish, and it wouldn’t have happened without discipline. I had to push myself to grow a habit of writing on a daily basis. I didn’t succeed on keeping that schedule tight, but followed a close version of it, one that I don’t seem to be able to do again now with the writing of my second novel. Maybe it has to do with the waiting period I am in for the publishing of the first one where I don’t feel much of the urge to push me to run on with the second one till my first baby is out on its feet.

Sometimes things look boring with such discipline, but when you are following hobbies that you like, life feels more rewarding. We do seek to make things right, and it takes time for a behavior to change and for a habit to grow. The things I mentioned above are not the only things that I do regularly to keep the best out of myself. Things that are essential to one’s social interactions and personal needs had to be taken care of on a regular basis such as one’s hygiene, one’s wardrobe, and one’s family and friends. It is all an art of management that only comes with creating good habits and killing bad ones.

Who said life is easy? It is not, but you learn to enjoy the efforts you put and reap the benefits of it. One thing I enjoyed recently is cutting my body fat to 15% while growing my twitter followers to 24,000! Nice job, no? 😛