Deciding to Change

You don’t need brain surgery to change your mind. So I don’t need to be a brain surgeon to help you. No matter how many degrees someone has, the bottom line is: YOU HAVE TO MAKE A CHANGE. If you’ve already made that change, you need to make it lasting and habitual. Common sense will eventually win out. We can continue to kid ourselves and blame age, kids, work or other things that we choose to define our lives. We can come up with new theories and create more specialties to deal with specific conditions. We can even give up.

But remember, whatever you decide to do is just that: you deciding. The things we now refer to as “reasons” are choices that we made. They may be results from the habits we’ve formed over the years. They may simply be excuses. Bottom line is: YOU DECIDED. You decided to eat that cup cake. You decided not to exercise for the past five years. You decided to stay late at work every day for the past month. Because you decided, I know that you can change.
Just as you decided to do all of these things that you now regret, I know that you can decide to do many things that you will love yourself for doing. You can decide to take care of yourself. You can decide to change your life. You can.

That is the first step in the process. “I can change” becomes the starting point for your journey of health. Notice I said health is a journey, not a destination. If health were a destination, I believe that more of us would stay there. But health is a journey. Health is something that can change on a day to day basis, for better or for worse. You can be “healthy” one day and not the next.

Some people look at this as a discouraging idea. I look at it as reinforcement that health is a journey. First of all, the fact that it can change so quickly emphasizes the importance of healthy habits. Without them, your condition or results are only temporary.

The results only last as long as the habits do. So with that in mind, bad health only lasts as long as bad habits do. That is why I know you can change. I know that you didn’t start these habits yesterday, so I don’t expect you to change them by tomorrow. I know that it took years to develop your current routine, so I am prepared for it to take you time to develop your new one.