The weakest living creature, by concentrating his powers on a single object, can accomplish something: the strongest, by dispersing his over many, may fail to accomplish anything.
Your goal should be to enjoy high levels of health, fitness, and energy; to feel terrific about yourself; and to live a long, happy, pain-free life.
Fortunately, in the twenty-first century, much of what you accomplish or fail to accomplish with your health is under your control. The lifestyle habits you form and the decisions you make can have an enormous impact on the quality of your life and how long it lasts.
But very little happens by chance, and this is especially true in regard to your health and fitness. Just as you cannot expect your finances and your relationships to take care of themselves without your active intervention, you cannot expect to enjoy superb levels of health and fitness without your active involvement and participation every day of your life.
In the 1990s, Barry Sears wrote an excellent book on nutrition called The Zone. In this book, he explains how your body is like a factory and how every food you eat is like a chemical that goes into the production process of the factory. By changing the foods, or chemicals, you can change the process and the results.
The Zone teaches you how to eat in a healthier way so that you maintain high levels of energy and simultaneously lose weight. At the end of the book, Sears answers frequently asked questions from readers on living and eating in the zone. One of the questions I especially liked was from someone who wrote, “What if you ‘fall off the wagon’ and you eat a large meal with dessert, or eat too much as people do over the holiday season?”
Barry Sears’s answer is a classic: “Always remember that, no matter what you have eaten in the past, you are only one meal out of the zone.”
You may have engaged in health habits that were not good for you in the past, but at any time, you can make a decision to change. You can decide at this very moment that, from now on, you are going to eat the right foods, drink the right liquids, get the proper exercise, and get ample amounts of sleep. At any moment, you are free to choose, going forward, to live a healthy life. It is up to you.
Some experts today feel that most illnesses that shorten your life are either the result of poor habits of nutrition and exercise or psychosomatic in origin, where “psycho,” the mind, makes “soma,” the body, sick. You may not be able to control all of the factors that influence your health and well-being, but you have considerable control over most of them.
The starting point of achieving ideal levels of health and fitness is for you to make a decision to get into the best physical condition of your life, and then to maintain that level of physical conditioning and well-being indefinitely. Without this kind of firm decision, nothing happens. But if you make this kind of decision and stick to it, virtually everything is possible.
Here are twelve steps that you can follow to set and achieve all your health and fitness goals.
What do you really want for yourself in terms of health and fitness? Your intense desire to enjoy high levels of physical well-being is the essential starting point of superb health. If you want it long enough and hard enough, nothing can stop you from eventually achieving a state of excellent all-around health.
Imagine that you could wave a magic wand and enjoy perfect physical health in every way. What would you look like? How would you feel? How much would you weigh? How would your physical body be different from what it is today? What changes would you have to make in your lifestyle and your health habits to enjoy superb levels of health and energy?
Clarity is essential. The greater clarity you have with regard to the person you want to be and the lifestyle you want to enjoy, the easier it is to make the necessary decisions and take the necessary actions to make those goals a reality.
No matter what you have done, or failed to do, in the past, you must believe that what others have achieved in terms of physical fitness, within reason, you can achieve as well. No matter how long you have been overweight or unfit, at one time in your life, your weight was ideal and your level of fitness was superb. It may have been a long time ago, but what you have done in the past, you can certainly repeat again in the future.
Many people are convinced that their level of fitness, or unfitness, is largely fixed. They have been this way for so many years that they cannot imagine changing. Sometimes they attribute it to their genetic inheritance or to their glands. They justify and rationalize being unable to make any real changes.
But imagine that someone offered you a million dollars cash if you would become superbly healthy, fit, and trim over the next twelve months. And the person offering you the million dollars would also pay for personal trainers, professional chefs, fitness club memberships, and exercise equipment to help you achieve your goal. Under those conditions, with a million-dollar prize hanging in the balance, could you alter your health habits and achieve your physical goals?
If the answer is “yes,” then we are not talking about a lack of ability but rather a lack of motivation. What you are saying is that, if the motivation was high enough, you could change whatever health habits or behaviors you needed to, to achieve a particular fitness goal. The question is not whether you are capable of achieving a superb level of fitness; the only question is, “How badly do you want it?”
I had a close friend who was overweight for many years. He always had a reason or excuse for not being able to lose the weight. Then, one day, he had a heart attack. When he woke up, his doctor told him that if he did not lose fifty pounds in the next six months, he would not live out the year.
With that threat hanging over his head, my friend immediately changed his diet, stopped eating all unhealthy foods, began exercising every day, and lost more than fifty pounds over the next six months—and he never gained it back. The possibility of dying was a sufficient motivator to overcome years of bad habits and excuses.
Your success or failure, especially in the areas of health and fitness, is largely determined by your habits. Healthy people have good health habits, and unhealthy people have poor health habits. As Ed Forman, the motivational speaker, once said, “Bad habits are easy to form, but hard to live with; good habits are hard to form, but easy to live with.”
The most important belief you can develop for your physical well-being is that you have the willpower, right now, to develop any healthy habit that you need to enjoy superb levels of health and fitness for the rest of your life.
Write out a clear, specific description of your ideal physical self in every aspect. Be clear about the amount that you intend to weigh, your ideal waist size, the number of minutes and hours that you intend to exercise each day and each week, and every other aspect of your level of physical well-being.
Get a complete medical checkup so that you know exactly where you are today. What is your current weight? Write out a description of your current physical lifestyle. How much do you exercise each week? How many hours do you sleep each night, and how well do you sleep? Analyze your current diet and level of nutrition. List the foods you eat regularly and the vitamin and mineral supplements that you take on a daily basis.
Before you begin any physical fitness program, get advice from your doctor. Consult a physical fitness specialist. Talk to a personal trainer.
Remember, it doesn’t matter where you are coming from; all that really matters is where you’re going.
What are all the benefits that will flow to you when you achieve the best physical condition of your life?
How much will you weigh and what will you look like? How will your physical condition be different from what it is today? How will you feel about yourself, especially in terms of personal pride and self-confidence when you enjoy superb levels of fitness? How will you look to others, and how much more attractive will you be to members of the opposite sex?
A student of my audio programs wrote and told me his story recently. He had listened to my programs on goal setting, sales, and personal success and made a lot of money.
But he had been twenty-five pounds overweight for his entire adult life, into his thirties, and it had really affected his self-esteem and self-confidence, especially in his relationships with women.
Then he learned about the “the three white poisons”— white flour, white salt, and white sugar—in one of my programs. I advised eliminating them completely from one’s diet, which he did. He told me that in ninety days, he had dropped twenty-two pounds, and he kept it off for over a year. He said that, as a result, he felt more attractive. This made him feel more confident and dramatically improved his social life. He was amazed at how different and better he felt with the loss of weight, especially from something so simple as cutting out sugar, salt, and flour.
You may need to make a complete change in your lifestyle, over several months or more, depending upon your starting point. Set deadlines and specific dates at which you will begin certain new behaviors and achieve certain benchmarks.
At the beginning of your new regimen, be patient with yourself. It takes many years to develop poor health habits, and it takes many months to replace those bad habits with good habits. You will slip from time to time. No matter how disciplined you are, you will overeat, overdrink, or under-exercise, at least occasionally. But remember, you are only one step, one action, one meal out of “the zone.” You can get back into the zone at any time.
Be sure that your deadlines are realistic, believable, and achievable. By eating smaller portions of higher quality foods, eliminating desserts, and exercising a little bit more each day, you can quite comfortably lose one ounce per day. One ounce per day will translate into two pounds per month. Two pounds per month will translate into twenty-four pounds per year, or even more, of permanent weight loss.
By losing weight gradually over time, you avoid the “yoyo effect” of losing and gaining weight continually. Instead, you gradually develop new, permanent health habits that enable you to take off the weight and keep it off. You gradually increase your level of physical fitness and then maintain it permanently.
As you know by now, the main obstacles to achieving the level of health and fitness you desire are mostly internal. They are contained in your attitudes and behaviors, especially your levels of self-discipline.
Fortunately, all habits are learned. Bad habits can be unlearned and replaced with good habits. Especially, you can develop the habit of self-discipline by practicing self-discipline whenever it is required.
There seems to be a direct connection between self-discipline and self-esteem. Whenever you practice self-discipline in the pursuit of one of your goals, your self-esteem goes up. Whenever you force yourself to persist in the face of temptation or adversity, you like and respect yourself more. As your self-esteem increases and you like yourself more, your ability to discipline yourself increases as well. Each exercise of self-discipline builds your self-esteem, which, in return, increases your self-discipline. You get onto an upward spiral in life.
Sometimes, a single book on nutrition can open your eyes and change your attitude toward food for the rest of your life. Sometimes, a single exercise program—where you learn how to work out both your upper body and lower body and alternate your exercises between strength, flexibility, and endurance—can give you the tools you need to enjoy high levels of fitness for the rest of your life.
The more you learn about nutrition, diet, and exercise, the easier it becomes for you to make the right choices and decisions to achieve and maintain high levels of fitness and energy. Did you know that eating one apple each day in the morning, thirty minutes before you eat a high-protein breakfast, can curb your appetite, improve your regularity, give you all the antioxidants you need for the day, and help you to lose weight? The old adage “An apple a day keeps the doctor away” turns out to be quite correct.
Did you know that twenty minutes after you begin eating, your “appestat” turns off, and you are no longer hungry? If you eat smaller portions, eat them slowly, and then stop eating after twenty minutes, you will lose weight, have more energy, sleep better at night, and get all the nutrition you require.
You may need to consult with a doctor, a physical trainer, a coach, or someone else if physical fitness is your goal. Experts can help you to achieve your aspirations of wellness far faster than you might achieve them on your own. Who are they?
Make a list of every single step that you could take to achieve a wonderful life of health, fitness, and well-being, and then organize that list by sequence and priority. What should you do first? What should you do second? What is more important and what is less important?
Develop a written diet and fitness plan for each week and each month. Make an appointment with yourself to exercise for a certain number of minutes each day, even if this only entails going for a walk. Set exercise, fitness, and weight goals for yourself for each week and each month, and then stick to them.
Above all, attach action commitments to each of your health goals. Be specific about exactly what you are going to do, and what you are not going to do, to achieve those goals. Then discipline yourself to follow through on your commitments.
All improvements in your outer life begin with an improvement in your mental pictures. Create a clear, positive, exciting vision of yourself enjoying the highest levels of health and energy of your lifetime.
Take a picture out of a magazine of a person with the kind of physical body you would like to have and put it on your refrigerator. Put a photograph of yourself over the face of the person from the magazine so that you see yourself each time you go to your refrigerator.
As you go through the day, create a mental picture of yourself eating light and lean, exercising regularly, and both feeling and looking terrific. Before you go to sleep at night, feed this visual image into your mind so that your subconscious can work on it overnight. When you get up in the morning, think of yourself as healthy, thin, and fit. When you select the foods that you are going to eat, ask yourself, “What would a healthy, fit, disciplined, highly energetic person eat at a time like this?”
Accept that changing your lifestyle is a process of two steps forward and one step back. Your job is to persist resolutely until your new health habits are locked in and become both automatic and easy.
If your goal is truly to enjoy the highest levels of health and fitness that are possible for you, take action this very day. Do something, do anything. Eat a salad for dinner rather than a larger meal. Drink water rather than soft drinks when you are thirsty. Go for a walk around the block in the evening rather than watching television. Decide today to incorporate the behaviors of a healthy, fit person into every part of your lifestyle, and stick with it until you have locked in the habits of healthy living that will last for the rest of your life.
1. Decide today what you would look like and how you would feel if your health was perfect in every way.
2. Determine your ideal weight and make a plan to attain that weight within a specific time period.
3. Decide upon your ideal level of fitness and make a plan to achieve it.
4. What will you have to do more of to enjoy excellent all-around health and fitness?
5. What will you have to do less of to attain the level of fitness you desire?
6. What will you have to start doing to become superbly healthy and fit?
7. What will you have to stop doing altogether so you can be as healthy and fit as you desire?