learn

As part of the challenge series for 2019 that I introduced a few days ago, here are four thoughts on getting started on your journey to improve your health and fitness this year.

The Best Way to Get Started Improving Your Health: Start TODAY

This is a caveat well-learned from personal experience.

How many times have you said to yourself, or someone important in your life: “I’ll do it when…”

For those of us prone to procrastinate, putting a task off using “the when” ploy can be a stroke of genius – it’s ridiculously easy to set a target that’s so nebulous, so distant, so unlikely, or the final domino to fall in a complex, convoluted chain of events that you never have to step up, make a decision, and act.

I’ve been there, I’ve used this contrivance many a time, and heard so many versions of “the when” I should write a book about it (maybe I’ll get around to that when I get the current book finished).

A dear friend and mentor years ago stopped me right in my tracks after using “the when” ruse and verbally slapped me up the side of the head and said to just do it. He was right.

It’s time to start your health and wellness journey (or recovery) today. Just take the first step and start. You don’t have to leap, or cover huge ground. Tiny steps, coupled with a resolve to change and improve, count just as much.

Begin Your Health Journey with The End in Mind

The same guy who provided the wake up call mentioned above offered another great piece of life advice – begin any life adventure with the end in mind. His analogy built around the reality that you might not be able to define precisely the path you’ll take, but you can capture a vision of your eventual destination.

A few days back I offered a few reminders about goal setting using the SMART approach in particular; framing your vision (setting goals) should be encouraging and fun. I encourage clients to develop big, longer term visions of how they’d like their lives to look down the road, and set concrete, attainable, SMART goals along the path to get there.

Begin your health journey with the end in mind.

Strive for Flexibility (And Not Just Metabolic Flexibility)

I truly love the concept of metabolic flexibility (in a nutshell, being able to effectively and efficiently utilizing different nutritional substrates to thrive in different situations).

It’s important to develop another form of flexibility on this health and wellness journey, a flexibility that recognizes and embraces the likely fact that you’ll need to use different approaches at different times along your way to achieve your optimal results.

What the heck does that mean? Probably the most common example I see in my coaching practice is very close to this actual story. Let’s say Lindy has decided it’s time to drop 65 pounds, and enthusiastically starts in on a Primally-aligned nutrition program, and the first 25 pounds seem to fly off by April Fool’s Day. Her weight loss slows in April, and by the end of May she’s only down another 7 pounds, and while her heartburn has resolved, she’s down two dress sizes, and feels great, she’s frustrated and even a little panicked about having stalled.

Her friend, who happens to be a health coach, looks over her diet, and finds she’s eating a bowl of fruit every day. Lindy agrees to cut fruit to once per week, and adds in a walking program that she loves, walking 30min a day initially, though by week four she’s walking an hour a day or more, sometimes out again for another walk in the evening with her husband on those long summer days.

By September first, Lindy’s weight loss now totals 58 pounds, though while being chased by a dog at the park, she stumbled off a curb and fractured a metatarsal in her left foot, ending her walking program for six weeks.

Encouraged by her friend, Lindy decided to give a run of nutritional ketosis a try, and coupled with an intermittent fasting trial, lost another 7 pounds effortlessly over the next six weeks waiting for her fracture to heal.

The point is simple – as your metabolism (and overall physiology) improves and changes, particularly if you’re starting from a point of genuine metabolic derangement (metabolic syndrome), you’ll likely need to change your approach to nutrition and activity multiple times along the way.

Learn, Learn, Learn (Get Good at Finding Nuggets and Filtering Noise)

Finally, and probably my favorite concept in the entire health and wellness universe right now, it is critical that you embrace the reality that you’ll be learning vital and useful information from this point forward as you take greater responsibility for your wellness and fitness.

There’s a literal flood of great information available at your fingertips today, much of it free for the taking, and you have the ability to access experts worldwide via digital communications easily.

Granted, there’s a lot of noise (generously put – less useful, even frankly misleading information) out there. Finding nuggets of useful information takes a bit of sifting, and filtering the noise can take some effort. Sorting the best information from the rest is a skill you’ll get better at with practice, though I’d encourage anyone wanting to improve their health and fitness to read widely and frequently.

You’re unique, your body and physiology are unique to you, and your challenge is to find the package of nutrition and conditioning that make you the best you can be this year.

Need help sorting it out? We can help you anytime.

It’s time to get started.