Today’s HEALTH Gives Me Strength
I need to begin this chapter by making a confession. Usually when people pick up a book, especially a book that contains advice, they expect the author to be an expert in every area he writes about. That is not the case with me when it comes to health.
For much of my life, I have dropped the ball in this area. It was really more a matter of neglect than anything else. I’ve always been as healthy as a horse. The only thing that regularly bothers me is seasonal allergies, and I just work around them. In fact, in thirty years of public speaking, first as a pastor and then as a conference and seminar leader, I have never missed an engagement due to illness. Not one! I just don’t get sick, and I’ve always had lots of energy. Even when I had to burn the candle at both ends, I still had plenty of energy left over.
I have lived a very fast-paced life. For about ten years, I held down two demanding jobs. I led a church of more than 3,000 people with a staff of over 50 and a budget of $5 million a year. At the same time, I led a leadership development organization that required me to travel to speak more than 100 days a year. When I gave up the pastorate to dedicate my time to my organization, I nearly doubled my travel. I also built up the company and increased the number of employees from 18 to 175.
Maintaining a lifestyle at that pace meant that I rarely exercised, I didn’t eat well, and I was overweight. But I didn’t worry. Every year I took a physical and received an excellent report from my doctor. So I simply took my health for granted.
Party Hearty
All that changed for me on December 18, 1998. That was the night of the annual Christmas party for my employees and their spouses. We had all enjoyed a nice dinner at the 755 Club at Atlanta’s Turner Field where the Braves play, and many of us were enjoying music and doing some dancing. At the end of the party, I didn’t feel well. One of my employees gave me a good-bye hug and felt cold sweat on the back of my neck. Then suddenly I felt an excruciating pain in my chest that brought me to my knees. I had never experienced anything like it. As I lay on the floor awaiting the paramedics, it felt like an elephant was sitting on my chest. I was grateful that Margaret, our children, and many of my closest friends were there with me at the party, because I thought I wasn’t going to make it.
When I got to the hospital, I was told I was having a serious heart attack. As I lay in the emergency room for the next few hours with doctors trying different treatments, none of which seemed to be working, my assistant, Linda Eggers, made a phone call. Six months earlier a cardiologist from Nashville named John Bright Cage had met me for lunch and shared his concern for my health. At the end of our conversation, he said that if I ever needed his help, I could call him, day or night, and he included his home phone number. So even though it was 2:00 a.m., Linda called him. Less than an hour later, in walked Dr. Jeff Marshall and some of his colleagues, announcing, “The A-team is here.” Dr. Cage had called one of the finest cardiologists in Atlanta and asked him to help me.
In the wee hours of the morning, Dr. Marshall performed a procedure to remove a clot that had made its way into my heart. He saved my life. Afterward, he explained that he had used a new procedure that had only recently been developed. If I’d had my heart attack a year or two earlier, nothing could have been done. It would have killed me!
Why Health Matters Today
It almost seems too obvious to mention that your health matters today, yet I believe I must say it, because many people treat their bodies the way I did for more than fifty years. So here’s a reminder of what’s at stake when it comes to health:
YOUR HEALTH IMPACTS YOU EMOTIONALLY, INTELLECTUALLY, AND SPIRITUALLY
You can escape from a lot of things that might hurt you. You can quit a hazardous job. You can move from one climate to another. You can stay away from someone who wants to harm you. But you can’t get away from your body. For as long as you live, you’re stuck with it. If you make choices that cause you to be continually hurting or unhealthy, it will affect every aspect of your life—your heart, mind, and spirit. Think about how hard it is to be positive, concentrate, or pray when you have a toothache. More serious conditions can be even more distracting.
HEALTH OFTEN DETERMINES QUALITY AS WELL AS QUANTITY OF LIFE
My friend Zig Ziglar asks the question, “If you had a million-dollar racehorse, would you allow it to smoke cigarettes, drink whiskey, and stay out all night? How about a thousand-dollar dog?” Of course you wouldn’t. A thoroughbred horse that was not taken care of would never be capable of winning a race. A dog whose health ran down would not work effectively or show well. The real question is, If you wouldn’t allow your animals to do such things, then why would you allow yourself to?
Have you ever known people who used excessive amounts of alcohol, drugs or tobacco? Such abuses sometimes cause early death. Others become old before their time and suffer serious health problems.
IT’S EASIER TO MAINTAIN GOOD HEALTH THAN TO REGAIN IT
People are funny. When they are young, they will spend their health to get wealth. Later, they will gladly pay all they have trying to get their health back. I fell into a similar trap, even though I wasn’t trying to accumulate wealth. I was driven by a sense of mission and the desire to achieve. That caused me to make a number of costly mistakes:
• I was arrogant about my health.
• I thought because I felt good, I was healthy.
• I worked too hard.
• I did not exercise enough.
• I didn’t listen to loving friends who tried to warn me about my lifestyle.
It’s always easier to maintain good health than to regain it. (Remember what it felt like trying to get back in shape to play a sport after an off-season of inactivity?) Unfortunately, some lapses in health are permanent, and you can’t get back what you’ve lost.
People are funny. When they are young, they will spend their health to get wealth. Later, they will gladly pay all they have trying to get their health back.
Making the Decision to Know and Follow Healthy Guidelines Daily
As I recovered from my heart attack in the hospital, I felt very fortunate to be alive. Cardiovascular diseases are the number one cause of death in the United States and Europe.1 But I didn’t discover how blessed I was until Dr. Marshall told me that I had sustained no damage to my heart. That meant I had the potential to make a full recovery.
Dr. Marshall told me that men who survive an early heart attack (and learn from it) often live longer and healthier lives than those who never suffer a heart attack. The key to my future health would be whether I was willing to make the decision to change the way I lived and stick with it. More specifically, he asked me to eat low-fat foods and exercise every day. I had of course tried to put myself on diets before. But they often worked out something like this:
Breakfast
1/2 grapefruit
1 slice plain whole wheat toast
8 oz. skim milk
Lunch
4 oz. broiled skinless chicken breast
1 cup steamed broccoli
1 Oreo cookie
Unsweetened tea
Midafternoon Snack
The rest of the package of Oreos
1 qt. Rocky Road ice cream
1 jar of fudge
Dinner
2 loaves garlic bread
Large pepperoni pizza
Pitcher of Coke
3 Milky Way candy bars
Entire frozen cheesecake eaten at the freezer
No more! At the age of fifty-one, I made this health decision: I will take good care of myself by exercising and eating right.
If you know the value of good health, yet you’ve had a hard time making the commitment to know and follow healthy guidelines, here are some suggestions to help you turn your attention to the subject and tackle it:
HAVE A PURPOSE WORTH LIVING FOR
Nothing is better than perspective for helping a person want to do the right thing. When you have something to live for, not only does it make you desire a long life, but it also helps you to see the importance of the steps along the way. Seeing the big picture enables us to put up with little irritations.
It’s hard to find motivation in the moment when there is no hope in the future. A sense of purpose helps a person to make a decision to change and then to follow through with the discipline required to make that change permanent. I found that to be true after my heart attack. A friend who spent a lot of time with me during my recovery saw me pass on desserts time after time—something that was not characteristic of me—and finally he asked, “Have you lost your craving for desserts?”
It’s hard to find motivation in the moment when there is no hope in the future.
“No,” I answered, “but my craving for life is greater.”
DO WORK YOU ENJOY
One of the greatest causes of debilitating stress in people’s lives is doing jobs they don’t enjoy. It’s like comedienne Lily Tomlin said, “The problem with the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.” I believe two major frustrations contribute to that stress. The first is doing work you don’t think is important. If you do work that you believe adds no value to yourself or to others, you quickly become demoralized. If you work in that state for a long time, it begins to wear you down. To remain healthy, your work must be in alignment with your values.
Another reason some people don’t like their work is because they do jobs that keep them in an area of weakness. Nobody can do that long and succeed. For example, most people hate the thought of public speaking. How would you like to get up in front of an audience and speak to them every day? That’s some people’s number one fear. But for me, that’s my greatest joy. After speaking to people for six or seven hours at a conference, I’m not tired. I’m fired up! Speaking to an audience energizes me.
One of the ways you can tell you’re working in an area of strength is that it actually gives you energy. Even if you are in the early stages of your career or are starting out on a new venture and you’re not very good at something you’re doing, you can still tell it’s an area of strength by paying attention to how you respond to your failures. Mistakes that challenge you show your areas of strength. Mistakes that threaten you show your areas of weakness.
FIND YOUR PACE
Mickey Mantle reportedly said, “If I had known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself.” I think that statement could apply to many people as they age. Part of taking care of yourself includes finding and maintaining the pace that’s right for you. If you take life more slowly than your energy level is capable of, you can become lazy. If you continually run at a pace faster than you are capable, you can burn out. You need to find your balance.
Mickey Mantle reportedly said, “If I had known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself.”
As I mentioned previously, I’ve always been a high-energy person, and I always thought there was nothing I couldn’t do. But in 1995, when I was forty-seven years old, I was so tired of leading my church and my own organization that I was worn out. I loved both, but doing them at the same time for over a decade was finally taking its toll on me.
One day I told Margaret, “I can’t keep doing this. I’ve got to give up one or the other.” Margaret had been advising me for years to cut back my busy schedule, but she was shocked by my statement.
“John,” she said, “in all the years I’ve known you, that’s the first time I’ve ever heard you say you are exhausted.”
Even today, at age fifty-seven, I still have a tendency to take on too much and go at a faster pace than is really good for me. There are so many opportunities I want to pursue, books I want to write, and people I want to help. I’m constantly trying to strike a balance between my desire to maintain a healthy pace of life and my drive to accomplish all I can during my lifetime.
ACCEPT YOUR PERSONAL WORTH
During the weeks and months after the terrorist attack on New York’s World Trade Center, the song “God Bless America” regained popularity and was performed repeatedly at ball games and other events. The song was written by Irving Berlin, creator of innumerable popular and Broadway hits such as “White Christmas,” “Easter Parade,” “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” and “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” Back when I lived in San Diego, I remember reading an interview with Berlin in the Union Tribune in which Don Freeman asked the songwriter whether there was a question he wished someone would have asked him. Berlin replied, “Yes, there is one. ‘What do you think of the many songs you’ve written that didn’t become hits?’ My reply would be that I still think they are wonderful!”
Berlin had a good sense of self-worth and confidence in his work, regardless of whether it was accepted by others. That’s certainly not true of everyone. In fact, a poor or distorted self-image is the cause of many health-threatening conditions and activities, from drug use and alcoholism to eating disorders and obesity.
Psychologist Joyce Brothers says, “An individual’s self-concept affects every aspect of human behavior. The ability to learn . . . the capacity to grow and change . . . the choice of friends, mates, and careers. It is no exaggeration to say that a strong positive self-image is the best possible preparation for success in life.” If your self-image is driving you to do things that negatively impact your health, seek help.
“It is no exaggeration to say that a strong positive self-image is the best possible preparation for success in life.”
—DR. JOYCE BROTHERS
LAUGH
Physician Bernie S. Siegel wrote in Peace, Love and Healing, “I’ve done the research and I hate to tell you, but everybody dies—lovers, joggers, vegetarians and non-smokers. I’m telling you this so that some of you who jog at 5 a.m. and eat vegetables will occasionally sleep late and have an ice cream cone.”2
We should never take life or ourselves too seriously. Each of us has idiosyncracies that can cause us to despair or to laugh. For example, when it comes to anything related to tools or technology, I’m clueless. I’m not Mr. Handyman—I’m Mr. Hopeless. I don’t let that bother me at all. If you can laugh at yourself loudly and often, you will find it liberating. There’s no better way to prevent stress from becoming distress.
Managing the Disciplines of Health
For some people, the disciplines of health appear to be easy. My friend Bill Hybels seems to manage them well. He eats well, runs regularly, and keeps his weight down. For years before I had my heart attack, he used to challenge me to take better care of myself. He used to joke to friends that while he was eating birdseed, I was eating steaks and rich desserts. He was right about it catching up with me. Although much of my problem was hereditary, my lifestyle made things worse.
After meeting with Dr. Marshall following my heart attack, I had a new discipline to manage: Every day I will eat low-fat foods and exercise for at least thirty-five minutes. He told me that 85 percent of all heart patients quit their healthy regimen within six months. Even though I had not succeeded in this area my first fifty years, I was determined to succeed in it the rest of my life.
Margaret and I learned everything we could about heart issues, low-fat diets, and exercise. I became a model of discipline. And in May of 2001 when I visited Dr. Marshall, he congratulated me. “John,” he said, “you’re doing all the right things. You don’t need to consider yourself a heart patient anymore.”
I wish I had never heard those words. You see, I love food, and I possess a “foodaholic” bent. Because of the good news I received from Dr. Marshall, I gave myself permission to cheat on my diet once in a while—something I had not done even once in two and a half years. A few weeks later, Margaret and I went on vacation to London with some friends, and I ate food that I had not touched in all that time. I loved every bit of it, especially the fish and chips.
The problem was that I quit managing my life according to the decision I had made. I had relaxed my discipline. Once my commitment was less than 100 percent, I got into trouble. I need to exercise and stay on my diet every day. But I began to slide: from every day, to most days, to some days. I ignored my own teaching that today matters. Neglect enough todays, and you’ll experience the “someday” you’ve wanted to avoid!
Neglect enough todays, and you’ll experience the “someday” you’ve wanted to avoid!
The good news is that I’m no longer “off the wagon.” I’m recommitted to my daily discipline. The bad news is that I’m doing only 80 percent of what I was doing before. Dr. Marshall is trying to help me. He’s a good doctor and a good friend, and he knows that sometimes the best medicine is a good kick in the butt. The area of health is still a battle, but it’s one I’m determined to win. As I fight the good fight, I hope you’ll join me by doing the following things daily:
EAT RIGHT
One day an old couple died in a car crash. They had been married for sixty years, and they were in excellent health due to the wife’s insistence that they exercise and adhere to a healthy diet. In heaven, St. Peter met them at the gate and ushered them to their mansion. It was equipped with a massive kitchen, an elegant master suite, and a Jacuzzi.
“This is wonderful,” said the man. “But how much is it going to cost us?”
“Nothing, of course,” answered St. Peter. “This is heaven.” He then ushered the couple outside and showed them that their house was on the eighteenth fairway of a golf course exactly like that at Augusta.
“You can play as much golf as you like,” said St. Peter. “This week it’s Augusta. Next week it’s Pebble Beach, then St. Andrews—you can check out the schedule in the pro shop.”
“This is unbelievable!” said the man. “What are the greens fees?”
“There are no greens fees in heaven. It’s free,” answered St. Peter.
Next they visited the clubhouse where there was a buffet unlike anything they’d ever seen. It had steamed lobsters, caviar, prime rib, exotic fowl, every kind of vegetable prepared to perfection, fresh-baked breads, mounds of sweet butter, and a dessert table that took their breath away.
“What do we have to pay to eat?” asked the old man.
“Don’t you understand?” said St. Peter, exasperated. “This is heaven! The food is free. Everything is free!”
“Okay,” replied the man, “but where are the low-cal and low-fat food tables?”
“That’s the best part,” said St. Peter. “You can eat as much as you like, and you’ll never get fat or sick.”
The old man went ballistic. He threw down his hat, stomped on it, and tore around the room screaming. When St. Peter and the man’s wife finally calmed him down enough to speak, he looked at his wife and said, “This is all your fault! If it weren’t for your blasted bran muffins, we could have been here ten years ago!”
It was Mark Twain who observed that “the only way to keep your health is to eat what you don’t want, drink what you don’t like, and do what you’d rather not.” Twain was being cynical, but there’s a lot of truth to what he said. If we could write our own rules for healthy eating, I think they would look something like this:
1. If no one sees you eat it, then it has no calories.
2. If you drink a diet soft drink with a candy bar, the calories are canceled out.
3. If you eat with a friend and you eat the same amount, the calories don’t count for either of you.
4. Foods used for medicinal purposes never count; examples include chocolate, brandy, and Sara Lee cheesecakes.
5. The secret of looking thinner is getting the people around you to gain weight.
The key to healthy eating is moderation and managing what you eat every day. Don’t rely on crash diets. Don’t worry about what you ate yesterday. Don’t put off good eating until tomorrow. Just try to eat what’s best for you in the moment. Focus on now.
“The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don’t want, drink what you don’t like, and do what you’d rather not.”
—MARK TWAIN
If you’re not sure how you’re doing or what you should (and shouldn’t) be eating, get a physical. Your doctor will let you know how you’re doing and how to change your diet.
EXERCISE
Most people I know either love exercise and do it excessively or they hate it and avoid it completely; yet consistent exercise is one of the keys to good health. Dr. Ralph S. Paffenberger Jr., a research epidemiologist and physician at the University of California at Berkeley, performed pioneering studies that revealed the impact of exercise on health. Paffenberger states,
We know that being physically fit is a way of protecting yourself against coronary heart disease, hypertension and stroke, plus adult-onset diabetes, obesity, osteoporosis, probably colon cancer and maybe other cancers, and probably clinical depression. Exercise has an enormous impact on the quality of life.3
Paffenberger, who ran 151 marathons, asserts that exercise is beneficial for people of all ages.
One of the tough things about exercising is that the immediate payoff seems so small. You weigh yourself after exercising. Nothing. You exercise the next day. Nothing. And the next day and the next. Still nothing. Then after the fifth day of exercise, maybe you see that you’ve lost half a pound. It’s easy to get discouraged, especially when you don’t see results most of the time. But your four days of discipline make the progress you see on the fifth day possible.
The key to success in this area is consistency. I exercise a minimum of five days a week by walking on a treadmill for at least thirty-five minutes a day. That’s what my doctor has recommended. If you don’t already practice the daily habit of exercise, then find a way to get started. It doesn’t really matter what you do as long as you do it. Talk to your doctor. Hire a trainer. Do whatever it takes to begin a regimen that’s right for you.
HANDLE STRESS EFFECTIVELY
A hundred years ago, most causes of illness were related to infectious disease. Today, they are related to stress. I once read a list of questions produced by the United Kingdom-based National Association for Mental Health to help a person gauge whether stress was becoming a problem. Here’s what it asked:
• Do minor problems and disappointments bother you more than they should?
• Are you finding it hard to get along with people (and them with you)?
• Have you found that you’re not getting a kick out of things you used to enjoy?
• Do your anxieties haunt you?
• Are you afraid of situations or people that didn’t bother you before?
• Have you become suspicious of people, even your friends?
• Do you ever feel that you are trapped?
• Do you feel inadequate?
If you answer yes to many of these questions, stress may be a problem for you. Everybody faces problems and feels pressure at times. Whether or not that pressure becomes stress depends on how you handle it. Here’s how I handle issues to keep them from becoming stressful to me:
• Family Problems: communication, unconditional love, time together
• Limited Options: creative thinking, advice from others, tenacity
• Staff Productivity Problems: immediate confrontation with the person and addressing the issue
• Staff Leaders with Bad Attitudes: removal
I’ve found that the worst thing I can do when it comes to any kind of potential pressure situation is to put off dealing with it. If you address problems with people as quickly as possible and don’t let issues build up, you greatly reduce the chances of being stressed out.
Reflecting on Health
Successful people make the major decisions in their life early and manage them daily. In the other chapters of this book, I try to show you how the decisions I’ve made and the disciplines I’ve practiced have created a positive compounding effect in my life. I’m sorry to say that I can’t do that when it comes to health. Instead, I’ll tell you how poor decisions have had a different kind of effect:
In my teens . . . I developed many bad eating habits.
In my 20s . . . Food became a stress reliever when I worked especially hard.
In my 30s . . . I finally started to exercise, but it was usually last on my agenda.
In my 40s . . . I realized I needed to attend to my health and made a decision to change, but I failed to add the necessary daily discipline.
In my 50s . . . I finally made the decision to know and follow healthy guidelines daily, a commitment I am working hard to keep.
Perhaps you have fallen short in one or more of the areas discussed in this book. Maybe you don’t feel good about it either and you want to improve, as I do. Please don’t be discouraged. And don’t give up! The following words were written for you and me at times like this:
Successful people make the major decisions in their life early and manage them daily.
Though you cannot go back and make a brand-new start,
my friend,
You can start now, and make a brand-new end.
Age Doesn’t Matter
Any time I’m tempted to be discouraged because of my late start in the area of health, I think about someone who never allowed age to overcome his desire to know and follow healthy guidelines daily. Take a look at some of the feats he’s accomplished during the second half of his life:
• At age 41—Swam from Alcatraz to Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco in handcuffs.
• At age 45—Did 1,000 push-ups and 1,000 chin-ups in one hour twenty-two minutes.
• At age 61—Swam the length of the Golden Gate Bridge underwater (with air tanks) while handcuffed, shackled, and towing a one-ton boat behind him.
• At age 70—Towed seventy boats with seventy passengers one and a half miles in Long Beach Harbor while handcuffed and shackled.4
The man I’m describing is eighty-eight-year-old fitness expert Jack LaLanne, whose exercise program was on television from 1951 to 1985. If you’re my age, you probably remember him. I began seeing him on television in the fifties.
LaLanne is someone who made his health decision when he was just fifteen. That’s when he heard a lecture about healthy foods and exercise. He changed his eating habits and began working out using weights he discovered at the Berkeley YMCA. “I turned myself into an athlete,” says LaLanne. “I was a skinny, awkward kid who became captain of the high school football team.”5
LaLanne studied premed, intending to become a doctor, but he decided that he wanted to focus on prevention for people’s health. (He later graduated from chiropractic college.) Instead, he opened a gym. LaLanne explains, “I took a lot of criticism from doctors who thought weight training was dangerous and that I was a charlatan. I’ve always said I’d be six-foot-two instead of five-foot-four if the health experts hadn’t spent so many years beating me down. Now the medical community is on my side.”6
That was in Oakland, California, back in 1936 when he was only twenty-one years old. LaLanne went on to develop many of the weight machines used in gyms today. And he became a bodybuilder. But his emphasis has always been on helping people. Even today as he approaches ninety, he travels the United States and around the world lecturing on health and fitness. And of course he still takes care of his health every day. He works out for two hours a day seven days a week. But he calls himself a workout nut and doesn’t recommend that kind of routine for everyone. He says, “For average folks . . . you don’t need more than twenty, thirty minutes . . . three or four times a week is plenty, but make it vigorous. And start out slowly, and if you’re going to start working out, get a physical.”7
LaLanne believes that anyone at any age in any health situation can become more healthy. His advice is straightforward:
If they’re overweight, normalize that weight. Quit exceeding the feed limit. And exercise is number one! I don’t care what you have wrong with you, you can do something—right? Maybe there are ten exercises you can’t do, but there are a hundred you can do.8
LaLanne is still going strong. And he says he has one more feat he’d like to accomplish: He wants to swim from Catalina Island to Los Angeles—twenty-six miles—underwater. “I never think of age,” he says, “I think about today; I don’t think about tomorrow. I think about this moment and what I am going to do.”9 That’s advice each of us should take.
HEALTH APPLICATION AND EXERCISESKNOWING AND FOLLOWING HEALTHY GUIDELINES DAILY
Your Health Decision Today
Where do you stand when it comes to health today? Ask yourself these three questions:
1. Have I already made the decision to know and follow healthy guidelines daily?
2. If so, when did I make that decision?
3. What exactly did I decide? (Write it here.)
Your Health Discipline Every Day
Based on the decision you made concerning your health, what discipline must you practice today and every day in order to be successful? Write it here.
Making Up for Yesterday
If you need some help making the decision to commit to good health and developing the everyday discipline to live it out, do the following exercises:
1. Take some time to write a list of all the things (and people) you have to live for. Then write the benefits that will come from having a long and healthy life.
2. Assess your work situation. Are you doing work you love? Does your career make the best use of your natural abilities, skills, and interests? Is your work aligned with your life purpose? The older you are, the greater the degree of alignment should be. If you’re over forty and you are still waiting to get “on track” or still trying to figure out what you want, you need to make some changes.
3. Take the most basic steps to achieving better health through following the ten guidelines suggested by the surgeon general of the United States, Dr. Richard Carmona:
1. Don’t smoke.
2. Eat a balanced diet.
3. Get exercise.
4. If you drink alcohol, do so in moderation, and never, ever drink and drive.
5. Don’t put off checkups and screenings.
6. Don’t abuse drugs.
7. Use protective gear (seat belts, protective goggles, batting helmets, etc.).
8. Talk about what you’re feeling.
9. Know your family health history.
10. Relax.10
4. Make an appointment with your doctor to discuss your overall health and physical condition. Ask him or her to give you a plan for adopting a healthy lifestyle. (Note: Compared to women, men are only half as likely to visit a doctor once a year and much less likely to schedule regular checkups or to see a doctor when they exhibit symptoms.11 So we need to be especially diligent and push ourselves to follow through with this step.)
Looking Forward to Tomorrow
Spend some time reflecting on how your decision concerning health and the daily discipline that comes out of it will positively impact you in the future. What will be the compounding benefits? Write them here.
Keep what you’ve written as a constant reminder, because . . .
Reflection today motivates your discipline every day, and
Discipline every day maximizes your decision of yesterday.