If you are not currently at your ideal weight and enjoying good health, it’s not because you don’t care to be healthy.
Am I right?
You got into the state you’re in because of a collection of interrelated, lifestyle choices that compounded over time into your current level of health.
LET'S ZOOM OUT FOR A SECOND
Every action you take on a given day has either a positive or negative effect on your health.
There’s no neutral.
You're either running in circles, or you're making progress.
You’re either building/sustaining health with each habit, or you're chipping away at it.
You’re either doing small things to maintain a healthy weight, or you’re working toward the middle age (or older) spread.
The thing about habits is most of them are unconscious.
Let me guess, for at least some of the following you haven’t given much thought to (or made many changes around) the long term effects of:
The way you get up out of a chair or off the floor
How many probiotic rich foods you have in your diet
Areas of life you've outsourced physical effort and the need to move
How hot your unfiltered shower water is
The thoughts you allow yourself to think
The beliefs you accept about the world
Your physical and emotional respond to stress
The amount of light that hits your eyes after dark and the position you sleep in
How much negativity you're exposed to from all forms of media
Scripting the 60 minutes before you go to bed
Reality is, everything I listed above has some impact on your health.
They are all small choices in a given day, but they all compounded over time and have everything to do with the health you do or do not enjoy.
If your health is not where you’d like it to be, the balancing scales of positive and negative health habits aren’t tipping in your favor.
Apply time and you get…where you are today—in short, you’re in health debt.
Your body is dealing with more than it can process.
You didn’t fall off course. You drifted.
You had enough unconscious negative habits that pulled you off course slightly, and you ended up somewhere you’d rather not be.
Makes sense right?
OK, GOT IT. HABITS MATTER. SO WHERE DO I START?
Here are some thoughts:
Take the next week and try to look at yourself as if you’re a character in a movie. Step back and watch yourself go through a day and ask questions about your routine. Question everything about why you’re doing what you do. Try not to let any habit go unnoticed.
As you go through your day, write down any habits you observed in one of two columns—positive health habits on one side and negative health habits on the other. These are your “balancing scales.” Take particular inventory of the habits at the beginning and end of your day.
At the end of the week, see how the scales looks. Which side has more weight?
GETTING YOUR MOJO BACK
Once you get a realistic sense of your habits, then you can start making some more observations about the largest bricks on the negative side of the scales.
One of the key things we suggest in our coaching and implement in our programs is to pick ONE key habit—something specific you will change in the next two to four weeks.
It doesn’t even have to be the habit you know is the worst one. Just pick a new, good habit and swap out a bad one—notice I didn’t say “quit” a bad habit, I said “swap.”
You don’t break a bad habit; you can only replace it.
I’ll write more about this process in the next post. In the meantime, if you want some help identifying your key habits to change, check out our Whole-Human Coaching. It's how we create full-spectrum, health-transformation plans.
It may be just the jump start you need.
Until then, let the tracking begin...
Christian
PS. Not sure which health habits to focus on? Here a way to audit the Top 70. Want some help with your health goals? Reach out. You're a phone call away from some serious clarity.
