I have always been active. However, there was a long portion of my life where I was very unhealthy. I relied on alcohol and drugs to suppress my emotions and pain while chasing pleasure. When was the next "party"? It's truly amazing how our brains can conjure up every excuse in the book to do or not do something.
Now we all know what we should be doing every day. We also ruminate over where we may or may not be in all areas of our lives and more than likely compare ourselves to others for good or bad reasons.
Some of us use this as fuel, but an overwhelming number of us use it to feel shame. As Tony Robbins said, "Don't should all over yourself." You are exactly where you should be right now. However, we all want to be better, and we are the only ones who can change that.
We want to be better financially, with our relationships, as parents, with our jobs, our goals, spiritually, our health, our to-do lists, our emotions, and so on. This feeling of being better is in all of us.
However, our amazing brain creates mountainous roadblocks: shame, guilt, fear of failure, anxiety, depression, chasing pleasure, chasing pain, lack of time, lack of motivation, lack of sleep, procrastination, it's Tuesday, and the sun is out. Name your excuse, and your mind will find one very quickly for you to quit or, worse, never even start.
I say this because this is how my mind works. It's challenging for me to start something and stick with it. I battle with it daily. As I sit here writing this, which I procrastinated doing for two weeks, my mind has already told me to do ten other things. But this is important to me It's something that helps me stay motivated by helping others understand we all have shit going on in all directions, but maybe this will help you begin something that will positively impact your life.
Start Here
I began this company to help you. I want to see you succeed. You will fail. You will try again. This might happen many times before your behavior changes. It's your brain creating mountains. Carve out a path to go through or around it. You will succeed.
Prioritization Of Your Health:
Sleep
Nutrition
Strength Training
Cardiovascular Training
Here is a big hint. All of these require behavior change.
Let's start with you don't have to be perfect. One or all of these might be a huge challenge for you. So focus on one or two at a time and slowly build the habits to correct and incorporate into your life as a priority. It will take time. Get most of them right 90% of the time and your life will change.
Sleep is the most powerful and important function that we do as humans. We have learned and are still learning that this is vitally important to our overall health. I have struggled with this one on and off. If you have, you understand how it feels when we are deprived of it. Get this right and other things will fall into place much easier. Here are some of my favorite resources on this subject:
Nutrition is next on our list. I won't bore you with why you should focus on your nutrition. We all understand the importance of it. Nutrition is not complicated. However, with the abundance of information, we like to demonize food and complicate the shit out of it. I am here to help simplify this. Get it right 90% of the time and you are winning.
I would challenge that our focus needs to be gaining strength/muscle and losing fat. I like to start with low-hanging fruit, pun intended. Protein intake and breakfast, or whatever your first meal is. It will change your life.
It will give you more energy and allow you to make better choices throughout your day. Eggs, greens, an additional protein (chicken sausage), fruit, and whole grain toast (optional) are my go-to starter kits for an easy well-rounded protein-centric beginning.
The laws of thermodynamics apply to everyone. A calorie deficit will allow you to lose weight. But losing body fat and gaining muscle is a bit trickier. So focus on the quality of your calories and make protein a priority.
The best way I like to help people start is 25/4. Can you get 25 grams of protein in each or 4 meals daily? One can be a supplement (protein shake). Then we progress from there. We need a minimum of 1.2 grams of protein per kg of body weight to prevent muscle loss in untrained individuals if you are resistance training that goes up to 1.6g per kg of body weight.
Nutrition: Choose good sources and a variety of protein, vegetables, fruit, and whole grains.
Strength Training is something we have spent an entire newsletter on and if you would like more information please refer to my past posts. However, I will touch on its importance and why it holds a place above cardiovascular training.
When trained properly, you can improve your cardio while strength training both aerobically and anaerobically.
We lose muscle mass at a compounding rate as we age. The longer we wait to start the harder it is to gain muscle.
Strength training adds muscle mass and skeletal muscle mass that improves bone density, overall health markers, and mental health markers, helps prevent all-cause mortality, and positively impacts all systems of your body.
Metabolic Conditioning (Cardio/Metcon) is our final stop on the high-priority list for optimal health and longevity. Your VO2, or the volume of oxygen in your blood during various levels of exercise output, is the highest marker for pure longevity.
So why isn't it above strength training/muscle mass? Because as we age muscle mass drops exponentially. Muscle loss and trying to produce a cardio output do not make it easy.
Also, bad nutrition means bad fuel for your body and poor sleep is a detriment to every system in your body. So here we are connecting everything on that list together. They all play their part in our health.
For more information on how you can improve one or all of these in your and your family's lives, click here: www.remissionwellness.com
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