Originally posted on Facebook HERE
Vacation is over, winter is coming, and when I’m on vacation I try to just let everything go. No workouts. Eat whatever whenever. Just relax and throw all the routines and schedules out the window. It’s a really good thing for me to do a few times a year. But our day to day lives are really run by routine. So – getting back into healthy routines after vacation can be a process. Because to me, really – staying in good physical health is critically important. So many things flow from there. And not just physical things, your physical health also affects your mind as well. It’s hard to be upbeat and happy if you’re not getting any sleep. If you’re beating yourself up because of how bad you look and feel physically, that negative self talk will affect how you view and react to other people. Your confidence will suffer. As an obsessive compulsive person I have what I think are crazy swings in the health area. I get obsessed with losing weight and go on the wild streaks where I workout seven days a week for months and lose fifteen pounds… then start coasting and gain it all back over time. Then get disgusted that I did all that work just to gain it all back and get obsessed with my weight again… knowing I can lose it because I’ve done it (more than once) before… and no matter what, I have never achieved what I would call my “I did it” goal. That goal would be to fully remove what I called “the bump” in my first book Feed Your Angel. “The bump” is the area just above the belt line where fat builds up (on me anyway). It drives me nuts (but of course, when you already live in Detroit you don’t need to take a bus to get there, but I digress)…. I’m not a fan of the bump. Even when I’ve worked out daily for months and hit 165 lbs – a weight that feels great for me – I still have the bump. Not sure what it would take to fully get rid of it, but man – if I ever did it, what a feeling that would be. Intense focus and commitment over a long period of time I guess. Health would have to be a primary focus in my daily routine, and lately it’s not even close. Business is almost always my #1 focus. Over everything. Now, I love what I do, and this is one reason it takes precedence over basically everything else in the battle for my time, but really – even business is affected by physical health. Because physical health affects mental health and mental health is a critical factor in doing what I do. Everything comes in waves. We tend to go back and forth with what we spend time on depending on our circumstances. But for me, maintaining my physical health never stays in the background for too long, because I think it’s really important. Yoga, running, meditation, strength training – important. Important enough to carve out the necessary time?… depends on where I’m at on the healthcare continuum I guess. But I can feel that it’s time to get a bit more serious than I’ve been recently. Something as simple as a walk every day can change everything. We need to move. We need to realize the importance of maintaining the only vehicle we’ll ever be given to navigate our lives through. Otherwise we’ll create routines that ignore it, and that’s not good for anyone.
