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Begin Your Health and Wellness Journey with the End in Mind

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A Very Short ‘Begin with the End in Mind’ Backstory

Several years ago, a physician friend, business partner, and mentor who possessed the gift of speaking very directly and candidly without crushing one’s spirit, began to challenge me about longer term goal setting.

The immediate context at the time happened to be non-health related (it was multifamily real estate in fact) though the principle translates beautifully to the health and wellness world.

My friend’s challenge was simple: never begin any journey in life (whether a literal journey or adventure, a major lifestyle or health adjustment, business project, etc.) without carefully considering what your goals might be, what the endpoint is, and what happens next (real estate guys call that your exit strategy).

Beginning Your Health and Wellness Journey with the End in Mind

By far and away the most common reason people have approached me in the past several years is a desire to shed excess pounds. Losing weight is one of the most commonly tagged New Year’s resolutions of the past 30 years, and perhaps the least successfully accomplished.

Getting started with a major lifestyle change to improve your health is pretty danged daunting, particularly if you’re truly engaged and serious about it. Fascinatingly, when I chat with folks about why they want to use a health coach to facilitate this transition, most often, they reply with very non-specific answers, almost always including “I just need to lose some weight”.

Hells bells, that was my own somewhat mis-focused intent over three years ago when starting my own recovery; I had no idea what my goals really were, what it would take to actually get there, or even if I could possibly drop enough pounds to make a real difference. No way could I have imagined dropping 170 pounds thus far, with more to go…

Simple Suggestions for Beginning with the End in Mind

First, think (or dream) big, respecting that for those of us over 40 (or perhaps even 30), charting big goals most often demands a longer time line. That’s ok, most of us can do more to improve our health than one might guess at first blush, and time becomes much less critical when you’re making steady gains along the way.

Make today’s decisions today; right now you only have to choose to eat the next meal on plan, take your next walk, or jump into that next workout. Other challenges down the road will come in due time, just make the decision to engage in the moment presently.

Craft a set of meaningful goals. At the start of the new year, I reminded readers about using SMART goals – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

Even better, set short, intermediate, and longer-term goals, and be prepared to adjust them along the way.

Dive in and get started. Now and again people I interact with, especially those who have a long road ahead to restore their health, get devastatingly discouraged looking at how far they have to go, and quit, or even worse, decide it’s not even worth trying.

And don’t forget to mind your focus. At least for now, we have this quote on the landing page of our main Older Bolder Fitness site –

The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new. – Socrates

Hone in with laser-like sharpness on the good changes you’re building into your routine – better food, more movement, targeted strengthening, less exposure to toxins and harmful behaviors, better sleep, better sex, and more.

Begin your journey with the end in mind; we’re here to help you along the way any time you have a question or need additional insight, encouragement, or a push.

Older Bolder 2019 Challenges: Four Thoughts on Getting Your Wellness Journey Started

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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.

Getting Started: Taking That First Step to a Healthier You

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For literally years during the time I was involved in the patient-oriented study and practice of medicine (twenty-five years and change), one of the most challenging tasks I faced was encouraging (if not mandating) that patients under my care commit to a healthier lifestyle.

For so many of those patients, getting to the metaphorical (and literal) first step in their personal journey to better health was deemed dauntingly complex and a huge hurdle to overcome, even though it was as simple as barefoot wading the shallows of Montana’s Gallatin River (my daughter Jess’ image above).

Details of my own story will be coming shortly as we launch Older Bolder Fitness’ more expansive website, though to share the Cliff Notes version, after finishing medical school I completed a residency in Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at the University of Utah, later spending a bit of time on faculty there before heading off into private practice.

My teams cared for patients who had suffered medical catastrophes of all sorts – including spinal cord injuries, ischemic and hemorrhagic cerebrovascular accidents (strokes), traumatic brain injuries, various orthopaedic injuries and cases requiring a comprehensive rehabilitative effort after joint replacements or unusually complex fractures, and all sorts and manners of neurologic and neurodegenerative diseases.

One glaringly common thread of all the non-traumatic pathologies we dealt with was that most were caused by or significantly worsened by what was called then (and still is today) lifestyle diseases – ranging from being “just a tiny bit” overweight to suffering the ravages of full-blown metabolic syndrome, morbid obesity, profound deconditioning (being really, really out of shape) , and including the devastating, whole body disaster that is wrought by the chronic process of excessive inflammation.

Getting to the First Step in a Healthier You

The team approach we used back in the day taught me a host of invaluable lessons, one of which was the critical necessity of taking a moment to take stock to fully understand where you (or the patient in our analogy above) stand, defining a reasonable set of incremental goals to attain, and then outlining a plan to get from Point A (you are here today) to Point B (where you want to be someday).

We stressed, even with severely challenged patients, that even though “recovery” seemed a long way off, if not impossibly far from where they sat that particular day, the road to recovery most often starts with the simplest of tasks.

Obviously one of the biggest obstacles my teams faced in guiding patients down this recovery pathway was getting them on board – they had to truly decide on some level that the investment of effort was worth at least a try; most, encouraged by a bit of early success, went on to significant gains and restoration.

The point: No matter what your objective – be it weight loss, overall better health, improved fitness and function, looking better naked, longevity, athletic performance pursuits, or whatever else – at some point you must decide to engage and start reshaping your world.

For many of us, that journey is best made with a team of sorts, whether that’s family, friends, a trainer or coach, even an online community, but you have to decide to engage and take the first step.

It’s time.