Give Yourself a Break

Health is one of the most important topics that we can talk about. Clearly I think it is important as it is part of my life and business. You are reading this, so it is on your mind at the moment too. With all of the discussion around health, it is obviously on others’ minds as well.

Most of the time when we talk health, it involves tips on getting enough exercise, eating the right foods and things that involve action. Taking action is the best thing you can do for your health. With action comes results and satisfaction.

How do we know what actions to take? Well, we discuss that in many articles and there is no shortage of information out there that you can find to help you. I would like to stress the common sense approach and remind you that we have known the best actions for years. Moving your body and not over-eating are the basics that you need to live healthy.

Obviously there is more to it than that, right? Well, of course. You can do more and get more. You do less and get less. You can even do nothing if you want. You know what you will get when you do nothing, so we often think of it as a bad thing.

As an overall strategy, doing nothing is not recommended for your health. I wouldn’t tell my coaching clients to do nothing. I wouldn’t help my clients plan “do nothing” programs for their employees. I wouldn’t expect any doctors to recommend the nothing plan for better health. I have yet to see those published anywhere.

Doing nothing can actually be a good thing for you. If you are working out throughout the year, you may want to take a scheduled break to let your body recover. You muscles and joints can recover. Your body simply needs rest sometimes to get back to normal. Most trainers, coaches and other professionals would recommend taking a week or two off each year to make sure that the body is recovering.

When you have been focusing on specific diet choices, it can get difficult to stick with it. When holiday season rolls around there are some particular barriers that we all run into. As you approach these times of the year, it can be helpful to take a break from your strict routine. I’m not suggesting eating everything in sight, but easing up a bit can have benefits over short periods of time.

Although there are physical benefits to taking a break from your routine, it always comes back to mental energy. When you work hard all year to stay on track with exercise and diet, it can be mentally exhausting. The break is going to allow you to take a step back and refocus.

If you are mentally strained, it will only get harder to stick with your routine. Again, I don’t suggest you try this over a long period of time because you want your routine to be intact and consistent in order to get the results you are looking for. Doing nothing can actually have positive effects on your routine. But you may want to have a routine going before you try this approach, but in short stints, nothing may be just what you need.

Just like we took summers off in school and take vacations from work, it can be helpful to take short breaks in our routines to make sure that we can recharge and come back stronger. So, if you are feeling run down and burned out after months of dedicated diet and exercise focus, it’s ok to give yourself a break.

Goal Clarity is the Key to Success

As the year winds down, I have many thoughts to coming to mind. Most of the thoughts involve the year and how fast it flew by. Each year seems to come and go a little faster. That reminds me of the importance of my goals. As I think of my goals a few questions come to mind:

- Did I do everything I wanted to do this year?
- What challenges did I run into this year?
- What will I do next year to overcome those challenges?
- What are my goals for next year?

These questions are not rare. Most people are asking themselves these questions as December comes to a close. The questions themselves are not the significant factor here. I am more concerned with the answers.

Each year, I am able to answer these questions with certainty. Why am I able to do this? I am certain of my answers, because I have clear goals and know exactly how I did throughout the year. Most people have goals. The problem is that they are not very clear. This makes it very difficult to succeed or even to know if you are succeeding or not.

You may hear about New Year’s Resolutions. You may even see some short-term success on these ideas, but when it comes to true long-term success, you need goals. In order to have success this year and through many years in the future, you need goals.
Goals are great. Goals are what we need to succeed. If you have a goal, you are ahead of the game and you can get the year started on the right note. If you don’t have a goal at all, how can you even get started?

As you start the year, or more importantly, before you start the year, it is important to make your goal as clear as possible. The goal itself is important, but if it is not clear, you may as well not set one. If there are questions or gray areas, you will find yourself guessing and possibly even losing track of your progress.

What makes a goal clear? Well, the goal itself can help you here. When you set a goal, make sure you are specific. If you are specific, you can tell the following:

1. If you are reaching it or not
2. How well you are doing/not doing

These are important measurements. First of all, you have to know if you are reaching your goal or not. If you are reaching it, you can give yourself credit and keep going. If not, it’s time to figure out what you need to do in order to start reaching it.

The questions you ask yourself are what allow you to look closely at your goal and your progress. Let’s take a look at the questions, I asked myself about this year’s goals:

- Did I do everything I wanted to do this year?
- What challenges did I run into this year?
- What will I do next year to overcome those challenges?
- What are my goals for next year?

These questions are important. The answers are even more important. If I didn’t do something, how can I get myself on track so that I can do it? What do I need to change to make it more realistic? The next question is about the challenges I ran or am running into. This is the difference between a New Year’s resolution and a real goal. If you don’t address the challenges that you are going to face, you are pretending that they aren’t going to be there. This is not realistic and will only make it more difficult to reach your goals.

The next questions are simple. They are simple because they are nothing more than building on what I learned from the last goals. I am setting new goals, but they are not pulled out of a hat. They are not some ideas from out of the blue. They are old goals with adjustments that allow them to become my new goals.

Those new goals are as clear as they can be. This is the benefit of setting real goals, analyzing your goals and then making those adjustments. It only makes your goals clear. When you set clear goals, you know that you are reaching it. If you are not reaching it, you know what you have to do to start reaching it.

Goals can be set on any day at any time of the year. Since many of us are focused on next year, it is important to clear up your goals. It is also important to clear up the difference between resolutions and real goals. If you simply through ideas out there and try to pass them off as goals, you will have a tough year. If you set a clear objective, you can locate and navigate challenges. When you make adjustments, your goals become clearer and your success becomes not only possible but probable. It is this clarity that brings success.

Health Doesn’t Change with the Season

If you show me a person that is off track “because of the holidays” I would bet you anything that they were either off track before the holidays or were never on track to begin with. The holiday season may bring many challenges, but if you are actually in the habit of something, you will keep doing it.

Do smokers forget to smoke between Thanksgiving and New Year’s? No way, they are in the habit and their patters likely change very little from month to month. Do you forget to put of decorations in your house because the season is too busy? Do you decide that you can’t fit in meetings at work or activities with family and friends during the holidays? No, in fact, that is what makes the holidays “THE Holidays”.

With all of the things we have going on, it is easier to say that we wanted to exercise, but didn’t have time. It is easier to say that we would be on track if we didn’t have so much going on. The fact is, you will make time for things that:

1. You are obligated to do
2. You really want to do
3. You are in the habit of doing

These 3 categories are what drive us to do everything. You name it, if you do it, you are doing it because of at least one of these 3 things. You are either obligated to do it, you really want to do it or you are simply in the habit of doing it.

Things that you are obligated to do

When you have to do something, there really isn’t much argument. You have to do it, so what do you do? You do it. Getting out of bed in the morning, going to work and taking care of household tasks are all things that we do without giving it much thought. If we don’t do them, there are serious consequences that we have already decided are too great to risk.

The only difference between people in healthy routines and people that are not in them is the fact that they look at the consequences of not doing it and see them as too great to risk. They also have found that the result of doing healthy things is far better than the results of not doing them. That is the beauty of it. When you are truly healthy, you know first-hand what happens when you do things differently and you have decided that it won’t work for you because you won’t get the results you want.

Things you really want to do

This is another no-brainer. When you really like something, you make time for it. The people that feel obligated to do healthy things have found that they LIKE the results of these things and so they keep doing them. You can always make time to see your friends. You can always make time to watch your favorite TV show. You like to do these things, so it is easy to make yourself do them. In fact, that is the key. When you really like something, you are not making yourself do it. You want to do it.

That is how people in healthy routines look at exercise and healthy foods. I like exercising because of how it makes me feel. It may be hard for someone that doesn’t exercise at all to hear that and go out for a run today. What makes it easier is another thing that I like about exercise: I like looking in the mirror and being happy with what I see. That is another thing that people like: results.

Things that you are in the habit of doing

Healthy habits are no different that unhealthy habits. If you do them enough, you will keep doing them. It won’t matter what time of year it is. If you are in the habit of doing something, you will do it no matter what other things are going on.

People in healthy habits don’t change because things are more stressful. In fact, they take comfort in their routine and actually use it to keep balance in all areas. People in routines are successful. Even if you are in a routine of unhealthy habits, you are successful. You are successfully keeping your health in a steady decline as you age. The longer you keep the unhealthy habits going, the more difficult it is to break them and the more damage is done.

So, no matter what time of year it is, think about your health and how it ranks with other priorities. You will be doing things that you are obligated to do. You will do things that you like to do. You will certainly do things that you are in the habit of doing. The more healthy items you can fit into this, the better your health will be all year. The holidays change anything. They just give you an excuse to do other things that you are obligated to do, that you like to do more and that you are simply in the habit of doing.

The worst habit during the holidays is the habit of blaming the season for you lack of motivation. If you want to do something you will do it, no matter what time of year it is. That is why the holidays is so difficult, right? You have so much that you HAVE TO DO? Well, I have found that habits don’t really change during the holidays. The only thing that changes are the excuses that we use to justify our habits.

Health is something that takes around the clock effort. What we eat, how much we move and many other factors come into play. The more you can focus on them, the better results you will get. Successful people don’t let things stand in the way of their goals simply because they are busy. That is all the holidays does to us. They make us busy and present an easy excuse to forget about our health. Health doesn’t change during the holidays. The same principles apply. If you don’t change your habits, your health will change you. And those changes will be far more stressful for you than shopping for gifts this year.

Stop Blaming the Holidays

As the holiday season rolls around, we all start to think differently. The hustle and bustle of the season gets us going and can be very difficult to avoid stress. As the stress mounts, the challenges of the holidays really come out. We are tired, there is too much to do and there are too many places to go.

Going to the gym is the last thing on our minds. Actually, it’s not. From my experience as a health coach, health and the things you need to do to be healthy are on our minds quite frequently. Even if the gym is a place you don’t frequently go, it is a place that you frequently think about.

The holidays don’t make it any easier, but they are not necessarily the culprit. Think about the rest of the year. I know it’s difficult to do this during the holidays since things get so hectic, but it is important to be realistic. Think about your normal routine on a February day. Or think about it on an August day. Whatever part of the year you feel is the most typical, think about it.

Now that you have a new month pictured, think about what your routine looks like. If you are anything like my coaching participants (before and in the early stages of our work together!), than your routine actually looks pretty similar. I know there is more going on during the holidays, but how different does your exercise routine look? How different does your diet look?

Most people are thinking about working out. If nothing else, it is that something that you want to do or that you know you should be doing. Never the less, it is on your mind. No matter how much, or hour little you have doing on, your health enters your thoughts regularly. Whether or not you do something about it, is another story.

After all, the holidays present extra activities and extra food, but are they really that different from the rest of the year? You still manage to go to work, take your kids to activities, attend parties, prepare or purchase holiday treats, buy presents for loved ones and all of the other things that seem to fill our plates. And outside of a few meals, our plates are filled about the same as they are during any other time of the year.

In other words, we all manage to keep our routines going through the toughest most stressful time of the year. No matter what is thrown at us, we manage it. We take it on and make sure that it gets done. If you are on track with your health, you will include exercise and diet choices on your list of must-dos. You will include it in December just as you do in March. You will include it because it is part of your routine.

That is the challenge most people are running into around the holidays. It’s not that there is so much going on that they don’t have time to exercise. You have time to do what you make time to do. That is why people can make time for holiday parties. That is why people make time to complete everything else on the long list. The only difference between healthy and unhealthy is including it on your list.

No matter what the season throws at you, health can fit in. In fact, exercise helps manage stress. What better way to find relief in a busy time of year than setting aside time to exercise. Eating healthy not only helps your body function at higher level, but it keeps your immune system strong so you can fight off the bugs that go along with the fall and winter seasons. And here’s a newsflash for you: If you are eating healthy before the holidays and you eat healthy after the holidays, the impact of a few meals will be minimal. The real problem is when every day is Thanksgiving.

Think about that as your move through the holiday season. Don’t blame the season on your lack of exercise. Don’t blame the season on your overeating. The season comes and goes. Your habits are here to stay. They are your habits until you change them. Rather than throwing your hands up and declaring the holidays as your worst enemy, sit down and think about it for a minutes.

If you have goals now, you can start to reach them. Maybe you can start slow by setting specific goals for the holiday season. Or maybe you can simply decide that what you want is what you will do. The problem that most people run into is the fact that what they want and what they are actually doing doesn’t match.

People in healthy routines don’t stop during the holidays. People with healthy routines don’t have to stop during the holidays. I have yet to see a person gain 5 years worth of weight in a month. It doesn’t work that way. Healthy people know that. That is why they plan their routines. They fit exercise in, just as people with unhealthy routines fit in everything else. The only difference between healthy and unhealthy during the holidays is making sure that healthy activities are on the list.

Healthy Holidays

Holiday Eating Strategies

The average person puts on weight over the holidays. Gaining 5 pounds between the Thanksgiving holiday and year’s end is not uncommon. It doesn’t have to be that way. You can celebrate guilt-free and still enjoy yourself if you have a plan. There are many more gatherings between now and spring. You can use them as opportunities to gain weight or to solidify your game-plan. It’s up to you.

Only Eat Sitting Down
It is easy to graze through events and grab things as you go. The problem here is you don’t realize how many calories you are actually consuming. In many cases, since you aren’t thinking about it, you don’t even realize you are eating anything.

Tip: If you only eat while you are seated, you not only eat less, but you actually enjoy each item more because you are taking the time to savor it.

Eat well the rest of the day
If you keep yourself on track by eating healthy then avoiding the candy and desserts is easier because you will not be hungry.

Tip: Make sure that your meals and snacks are healthy on the day of parties. That way you know that there is room for some goodies as a reward for the good day you put together.

Only buy/bring the treats that you don’t like
What may be tough for someone to resist may not be too hard for you to resist.

Tip: You can control the menu if you host events and you can bring any items you want when there is a potluck or dish-passing event. Bring healthier versions or things you know you won’t eat

Decide what you want to eat ahead of time
Look at the options available to you. Do you have a favorite? If so, why eat all the other stuff just because it’s there?

Tip: pick a treat and enjoy a reasonable amount of it. Sit down and eat it deliberately. When you are done, you can look back and remember you enjoyed it rather than the mindless eating that can go on all day.

This can be a challenging season, or it can be an enjoyable season. It all depends on how you prepare. If you have a plan and can stick to it, things will go well. If you don’t have a plan, how can you possibly stick with anything? You can’t be on track if there is no track.

Keep in mind that none of the tips above are suggesting anything radical or specific to a certain diet. Your plan has to work for you. If you are trying to follow someone else’s plan into the holidays, things will be even more challenging. Make sure that your weight loss or healthy eating strategy is in line with your goals and the things you like to eat. Portion control and exercise have been the best way to live healthy for centuries. Anything that goes against that or adds other stipulations is going to be even more difficult to follow because it isn’t natural.

Good luck! Have a healthy and happy holiday season!

Costs of not eating healthy

I hear people say that eating healthy is expensive. When someone tells me why they have been eating unhealthy foods, their reason is often the price of food. There is a common perception that healthy foods cost more than unhealthy foods.
Sometimes, in certain situations, this is true. For the most part, the statement: healthy food is more expensive is actually false. There are a few myths and misconceptions at play here.

I would like to take a closer look at those situations to determine why eating healthy can be more expensive. But more importantly, I want to break down the numbers and show how healthy food is often cheaper to purchase. We already know that there are more significant long-term costs to eating an unhealthy diet. I also want to break down some of those actual costs to see just how much it costs to eat healthy and how much it costs when you don’t.

Misconception #1
In General: Healthy food is more expensive than unhealthy food

This is something that I hear a lot. You see the value menu prices and compare them to the costs of fruits, vegetables and other fresh items and it’s easy to say, at first glance, that the value menu is cheaper. It only costs a dollar to get a sandwich. It only costs another dollar to get a side or a beverage.

How could something that was purchased at the store and prepared at home be cheaper? Well, let’s do the math: For $20, you can buy many combinations of food. Let’s say you just buy 20 $1 burgers from a fast food restaurant. That is 20 sandwiches for $20. Now let’s say you go to the store to buy the ingredients for 20 sandwiches. You need bread: $2 loaf, 1 lb. of meat for $8, a tomato for $1, cheese for another $2, a head of lettuce or spinach for $1. So far, we are able to make 20 sandwiches with as much nutritional value for only $14. We also lean meats of much higher quality than you get at a fast food restaurant. If you wanted to, you could make these sandwiches MUCH cheaper by skimping on quality, which is exactly what they do at the restaurant to make that sandwich so cheap for you to buy. You can upgrade the bread and add other veggies while still keeping the cost under $1 per sandwich.

As you can see, cheaper is not healthier. More importantly, healthier is not more expensive. You can make good foods at home without spending any more money. In fact, often, you can buy and make foods for less money than you would spend by eating out.

Reality
It actually costs more to eat out.

Misconception #2
Eating healthy food is not important to maintain good health

Many people think that as long as they are buying food from a familiar place, they are eating healthy. What’s worse is that often people think that what they eat doesn’t have a big impact on their health. The truth is: eating healthy is very important! If you don’t eat well, you don’t get good results from your body. Food is what fuels us and when we don’t get good fuel in, we don’t get good results out.

This is why so many Americans are tired, cranky and depressed. It is also why so many people need caffeine, don’t get as much done as they would like and just feel an overall dissatisfaction with their lives. The diet has a significant role in helping us do good things and helping us feel good about those things.

As we continue to abuse our bodies by putting in more fat, calories and chemicals, we start to develop other problems. The most common is excess weight. The body can only burn so many calories. Since most of us are not getting enough exercise to begin with, the fast-food combo becomes extra dangerous because we are packing in double, triple or even more calories on a daily basis. An obese individual spends about $2000 more each year on healthcare- medications and other procedures. They spend another $2000 on other incidentals throughout the course of a year. That is $4000 extra dollars spent, just because they are overweight. That doesn’t even include the extra money going toward all the extra food.

What are some of these other problems? How about Diabetes? A person with Diabetes spends an extra $900+ each year compared to a person that does not have the disease. This is due to medical costs, testing equipment and supplies as well as other procedures that are routine for them.

Those are the most common and immediate issues that come from eating unhealthy. We also know that there are some more severe consequences. Heart attacks and strokes cost people their lives every day in our country. For those that survive or their loved ones if they don’t, these events can cost over a million dollars each. When it comes to hospital stays, follow-up treatments and medications, these costs add up fast and don’t go away on their own.

Reality
Eating healthy is very important to maintaining good health

As you can see, there are many costs to NOT eating healthy. The longer we pretend that a dollar cheeseburger is a good deal, the more health issues we will be dealing with in the future. Even if the cost of a healthier choice were slightly more expensive, the results would lead to cheaper living for the rest of your life. The fact is, healthy food is NOT more expensive, so the excuse is no longer valid. Can you spend more money at the grocery store in a month than you spend on fast food? Of course you can, but that doesn’t mean you are getting as much food and certainly doesn’t mean that you are getting the nutrition that you need to live healthy.

There are more costs involved than simply the price the food. As illustrated above, you can spend more money on medication and medical treatments than you will ever spend on healthy foods. The bonus is that the healthy foods will actually prevent the need for medication and prevent you from needing medical treatment of any kind. We have known for centuries that healthy foods are the best medication. They are the best and they are the cheapest. Healthy food doesn’t cost more. It cost you more NOT to eat healthy.

Balance: Find it or you will regret it

Work-life balance is something we hear about on a regular basis. I discuss it with my clients as they find that they want to be companies that support work-life balance. I discuss it with my clients’ employees as they want to find it for themselves. Work-life balance is something we all strive for.

Balance itself is a word that can help us in many areas. When things are balanced, we can do things better. We can do good things and we can even do more of them. But most importantly, with balance, we don’t get too far off to one side in any area.

What does that mean? When you have balance, you are in the middle of the spectrum. On one end of the spectrum, you have one extreme and on the other end of the spectrum, you have the complete opposite. Being in the middle means that you have found a way to incorporate parts of both.

When it comes to work-life balance, this can be difficult to achieve. I know that you have to work in order to maintain a living. When I was an employee, I knew that I had to work in order to keep my job. As a business owner, now I know that I have to work in order to keep my business moving in the right direction.

My clients know all of this too, which is why they want their employee s to work hard for them. They not only want this, but expect employees to work hard on a regular basis. That is what makes a successful business. Hard working people doing their hard work every day is how a company gets ahead.

There is more to life than work, however. Just because hard work leads to success, does not mean that the harder you work and the further you are on the spectrum, the better you will be. This may be true in short stints, but over the long-term, you need to find balance or you will not be able to sustain the pace and eventually your performance will fall off.

My clients also know this, which is why they want to be supportive of a balanced work culture. When they talk about their employees, you hear about more than simply output or hours worked. You hear terms like sustainability, quality and of course balance. These terms are what come from a workforce that is not stuck on one end of the spectrum.

I’ve seen companies on both ends of the spectrum. We all know what happens when a workforce doesn’t do very much. We all know how it goes when people aren’t working hard or not working at all. That is never a good thing. What we don’t always think about is the consequences of working too hard.

Working too hard has consequences too. What happens when we work too hard? We start to see issues like fatigue and poor quality. Think about the work that is completed at the end of a long day or after too many hours, days and weeks in a row. What does the work look like? It actually takes longer to do the same tasks and you make more mistakes.

When it comes to health, work-life balance is very important. We all know what happens when you don’t take care of your health. You lose it and problems ensue. When you are on one end of the spectrum with your health, there is only one way that it will end. Well there are actually many ways it can end, but they are all bad. Heart issues, diabetes and even cancer are all attributed to poor lifestyle. Making unhealthy choices has clear consequences.

My clients know this too. Businesses that want to be successful today and in the long-run are taking note of this. They know that working hard is important, but they also know that taking care of health has a significant impact on their employees and the work they do.

Companies are seeing this in all industries. Balance doesn’t mean that people are exercising instead of working. Balance does not mean that people are reading nutrition labels instead of reports. And no, balance does not mean that employees are researching health products online instead of sending company emails. Balance means that people are working hard and making time for other things.

We all know that working hard is the key to getting ahead. What we need to realize is that people can’t work hard if they don’t have health. They can’t work hard if they don’t have rest. They can’t work hard of they don’t take time to recharge and recover.

Balance is more than just rest. Balance is both working hard and relaxing. Finding this balance is not only the key to health, but it is the key to success overall. Without balance, you cannot achieve success in any area. The idea of balance is good for everyone. Finding it is another story. When you find it, good things happen. If you don’t find it, there is a whole list of reasons for regret.

Vacation: Put it on Your To-do List

After coming back from a short weekend vacation, I couldn’t help but think to myself: I need to do this more often. There are a few things that made me think this. Obviously, vacation is a good thing, but there were some specifics that made me really appreciate this particular vacation.

Before I explain the specifics, let me explain the nature of this vacation. It was short. It was only a weekend. It was near home. We didn’t travel far away. This vacation wasn’t supposed to be the most relaxing or the most extravagant. It was simple, but clearly very effective.

So what made this vacation so effective? For starters, I had it on the calendar for a while. This sounds like a no-brainer, but when it comes to short trips and simple plans, they often get moved to the back burner or completely put off. It is easy to make room for big plans, but little things often get overlooked.

Vacation To-do List
Item 1: Schedule a quick vacation

Once this vacation was on my calendar, I could start planning the details. This really means that my wife could start planning the details. She has a knack for planning and organizing many things and vacations are one of them. Now that my calendar was blocked, I could be sure that those details would get done when we got to that date.

Vacations are something that we find very valuable. We have always taken them and some of our best memories have come from these trips. We do different things on some, others are similar activities done taking place in new locations. No matter what we do, things are planned ahead of time so we are ready and jump right into the enjoyment when we get there.

Vacation To-do List
Item 2: Plan the details

The calendar is marked, the details are coming together. The closer we get to the vacation, the more clearly we understand what will be done. Now is when I start getting excited. The time is set aside and I can look forward to spending it doing things that I am going to enjoy.

What is the best thing I can do to make sure that I enjoy these things? The best thing I can do is be present and focus on the main objective. Now, in my day to day life, I have many things to think about. I have emails to read and return. I have calls to make, messages to return and I have other things that are kept on my calendar to make sure my business is running smoothly.

That is just the business side of my life. At home, there is whole list of things that have to be done too. I’m not unique in this situation. We all have many things to do at work and at home. We also have hobbies and other obligations. Life is busy and it takes some practice to manage it and keep stress in check.

Keeping stress in check is no easy task. When it comes to vacations, you can do a lot for yourself just by taking them. But, that is not enough. We’ve all been guilty of this and it can defeat the whole purpose of our plans. The biggest problem we have is our inability to turn our brains off and truly focus on the vacation. It is too easy to check emails or make and take phone calls. If you don’t fully take the vacation, it doesn’t bring you nearly as much satisfaction.

Vacation To-do List
Item 3: Fully engage in your vacation

These “to-dos” are simple. At least they sound simple. The point of vacation is to get away. We want to go somewhere new and do things that are fun or relaxing. If we don’t fully commit to this, it happens, but we don’t get the results we really want. We come home feeling like we missed out or often it feels like we never left in the first place.

You don’t have to go far. You don’t have to be gone long. All you have to do is go. When you go, keep these keys in mind and you will truly feel rested and relaxed when you return. The vacation is very important part of a successful schedule. No matter how many things you have on your to-do list, make sure you make room for a real vacation.

Create Change or it will Create You

Changing is not easy. In any area of life, change is difficult. In everything we do, we can make changes to get new results. That doesn’t make it easy to do. When it comes to making changes in our health, change can be especially difficult.
When you think about your health, it is easy to think that changing is going to be a challenge. Many people are dealing with this dilemma by doing just that. They are thinking about how hard it will be to change. When you do this, it is even more difficult.

The difficulty often comes in the anticipation. The thought of change is worse than change itself. Think about the prospect of changing everything in your life in order to improve your health. We all know that you don’t have to change it all at once, but this feeling is common.

When you have been doing something for many years, it is hard to even imagine not doing it. Likewise, when you have not done something for many years it is hard to imagine doing it.

When you turn on the news and hear about the risks of not changing your lifestyle, how can change be scary? By comparison, isn’t changing a small habit easier than dealing with a major health issue? On paper that may make sense, but many people are not able to see it that way. The thought of change remains scary and therefore it gets avoided.
What is happening while we avoid change? Well, the title of this article says it all. If you don’t make a change, you will see other changes occur. The changes that you will see are not positive. They are the things we fear and never want to see happen.

This happens in all areas of life, but in health it just feels more cut and dry.
If you don’t exercise, you gain weight. If you eat fast food every day, you gain weight. If you smoke, you damage your lungs and your body is constantly full of toxins. All of these things lead to more serious illnesses. They lead to problems that none of us want to deal with.

I would think that these problems would be enough to help us change. Avoiding the change may be easier, but that doesn’t mean it is easy to deal with. Heart attacks are no fun. Aches and pains are no fun. Buying fat jeans is no fun. There is a whole list of things that are not fun. You get to deal with all of them if you try to avoid dealing with change. That’s life.

The title of the article came from a quote. That quote really hit home because I am talking to people every day that are dealing with this issue. They are looking at two options. One feels easy because it is what they have been doing for a long time. The other feels difficult because it requires them doing something different. The problem is that they aren’t seeing the entire picture. They see the immediate changes, but they don’t see the consequences of not making them. In reality, they are not seeing the worst part. They are letting the initial challenge of changing a habit be the scary part, when the real fear should come from the results of not changing that habit.

Don’t fear change. Fear what will happen if you don’t make change. The quote says it all: “Create change, or it will create you.” It is true. We are a product of our habits. Our health, our success and all of the results in our lives come from change. We either make changes to create the outcomes we want, or we let things happen and deal with the consequences. We always have a choice. What choice are you making?

Injuries Really Hurt

During a conversation with my coaching client, the topic of injuries came up. They were dealing with a few nagging injuries that made it very difficult for them to continue with their routine. The frustrating part about this for them was that they were not able to do as much as they wanted to do. The frustrating part for me was that the injuries were nagging.

I found myself getting frustrated because the injuries just wouldn’t go away. Why wouldn’t they go away? Well, they kept coming back, or really, they never fully healed because my client refused to give them time to do so. I can understand wanting to get out and go. I can understand not wanting to rest. I can even understand thinking that an injury is better, when it is not fully healed yet.

I’ve been there. I have dealt with injuries. In my athletic career, I dealt with injuries from head to toe. Thankfully, they didn’t all occur at the same time, but it seemed that there was always something wrong that I had to rest. Unfortunately, many of the injuries couldn’t be rested, so I just had to push through. But there were some injuries that I couldn’t just push through.

When there was a more serious injury, I simply couldn’t play. That was the reality. A trainer or doctor would say: if you continue to play, you will cause more damage and you will be out even longer. That was a pretty clear message. Basically, the lesson for me was: the sooner you stop and rest, the sooner you will heal and the better thing will heal. This wasn’t always an easy lesson to take, but it was better than missing more games in the future or dealing with more pain as an injury kept coming back.

My clients have gotten this lesson when things were more serious. The problem is not with serious injuries. The problem is with minor injuries. Things that they can simply fight through were the ones that they tried to ignore. The problem when they didn’t want to take time away from their routines is that eventually these minor injuries can turn into major injuries.

It doesn’t happen overnight. I’m not trying to scare anyone off the road or away from the gym. I’m simply reminding you that even little aches and pains can become serious issues if they are not taken care of. Taking care is the key when it comes to injuries. If you don’t do it, you can be out much longer than you think.

Often taking care of an injury is the difference between a minor set-back and a major hurdle. One of my clients thought they were just dealing with a minor strain. Months later, he was still dealing with it because he wouldn’t give it time to heal.

Time isn’t the only thing that helps injuries. The following ingredients may be what you need to keep on track, even if it means staying off until your injury has healed:

Ice it- Icing your injured area can help you recover more rapidly. The cold provides short-term pain relief and also limits swelling by reducing blood flow to the injured area.

Wrap it- Ace bandages or braces can give you added support during movement. Compression is a great way to limit swelling while you are resting.

Elevate it- holding the injured area above the heart can help reduce swelling as well

Stretch it- doing movements that simulate your exercise or sport can help you assess the severity of the injury and help you get back to it by easing into it. Stretch the injured area lightly and slowly so you don’t feel any pain. Keep the range of motion within your limits too, so you don’t re-aggravate it.

There is no magic cure for injuries. Major injuries need medical attention and even surgery. Minor injuries often just need time to heal. The key to remember is that the longer you are out, the more the injury will hurt you. It may not cause more physical pain, but injuries can make it very difficult to reach goals. Not reaching your goals can hurt a lot.

Medicine and Health are Very Different

I was giving a seminar at a school and I asked a group of students what they thought of when I said the word health. When asked what health meant to them, some said healthy as in doing healthy things. Others had specific ideas about what things can lead to health. Some said some things that actually disturbed me.

The most disturbing of the answers was: medicine. The fact that medicine and health were associated isn’t what made me think. That actually makes sense. The disturbing part that made me really think about our current state was something that came on the follow-up questions I asked.

When I asked them to elaborate on what “medical” meant to them, I was shocked to hear the answers. I heard: “Medicine that you need to get your health.” I also heard: “Medicine is what you get when you need to get healthy.” One student simply put it this way: “Medicine is what you get when you get sick.” When I asked about health, this student went right to sickness.

The more I think about this, the less surprised I am about the answers I got. Kids today are seeing the worst in health. They are actually seeing the best in medicine. As a nation, we are continually advancing in the field of medicine. We are doing things now that we would only dream of doing just a few years ago. I am impressed and even grateful for our medical advancements. We are doing great things. That isn’t the problem.

The problem is not our advancement in medicine. The problem we have is the reason that we have needed the advancement. We are becoming more and more dependent on these advances in order to live normal lives. There are people today that have more access to education and technology that can help them prevent illness, but instead, we are just giving them more drugs and using different technology to treat the symptoms that are brought on because they refused to use the education or technology to help them stay healthy in the first place.

The Difference Between Medicine and Health

The biggest difference between medicine and health is the time that it is utilized. Medicine is used to primarily to treat issues that are already happening. The body has become weak and medicine is used to get it back to full strength. More accurately, medicine is used to treat a symptom. When something is wrong on the outside, medicine helps change how it looks and allows you to feel like the symptom is gone. The symptom may be gone, but the root cause may still be wrong internally. Until that is fixed, the symptom will come back. It may come back as a different symptom.

What is the solution for this situation? You guessed it: another medicine. There is a medicine for every symptom and you can continue to take more and more as your symptoms continue. You may even get a medicine to counteract what another medicine is doing to you. Most medicines cause symptoms of their own.

Health, when done right is proactive. Health is the habit of doing things that help the body and mind. The more you do these things, the healthier you will be now and the healthier you will be tomorrow. Many of the needs that arise are simply things that we should’ve taken care of. Most medicines are given to reverse symptoms that are caused by lack of health. In other words, health allows you to take care of problems before they become problems.

The problems that we are dealing with are real, but they are coming up with more and more ways to administer medicine. There are many conditions that are serious and that people don’t have much control over, but that is not the norm. The norm is to spend more money and commit more research to drugs and procedures that can help bring people back from the brink of symptoms caused by their own choices.

Take a look at the commercials that are on TV or the ads in magazines. Not only will you find countless drugs and reminders that you “need” to take them in order to be healthy, but you will even find new conditions that you didn’t know existed. I’m not saying that there aren’t serious issues out there that medication is helping, but we have started putting more effort into finding the problem and throwing another medicine at it than we are putting in trying to solve the problem.

The scariest part about the entire medicine vs. health debate is that we have known for years what we need to do to keep health going strong. In fact, we are only in this situation now because we have not taken care of our health. I don’t know which came first, the chicken or the egg. We’ll call the lack of focus on our own personal well-being the chicken and the emphasis on the latest and greatest drug the egg.

No matter which came first, we have a problem. We have a big problem. People are no longer taking care of their health because medicine will “take care of them” when something goes wrong. This is true, medicine will take care of you when you are sick.

It will also cost you, your family and your company more and more money while you have more problems. You can just take more medicine as you add problems, so no worries, right? Wrong.

The only way to live healthy is to do healthy things. You can’t simply take a pill or have a surgery and become healthy. You can take a pill and mask a symptom. You can have a surgery to fix a problem. Without healthy habits, that problem is only going to come back, just as the symptom will return.

Medicine is great. We have seen incredible advancement that saves lives and allow people to do things that they wouldn’t have been able to do in years past. I’m not saying we should throw out all the technology. I am saying that we need to wake up. Our health is not dependent on medicine. Our health is in our hands. It always has been and it always will be in our hands.

Remember this: Avoiding problems is easier, less expensive and just plain smarter than waiting for them to appear and trying to fix them. Health is not just something you think about when you need medicine. Health is something you think about so you don’t need medicine.

How Healthy Are You?

Health is subjective. Some people are very healthy, while others are only a little. The notion that you are either healthy or unhealthy is completely ridiculous. The idea that you healthy or not, as if it is black and white, just doesn’t work for me.

Health is more like a spectrum and you can be anywhere from one end to the other. Healthy is at one end and unhealthy is all the way on the other end of the spectrum. We all tend to think we are on the healthy side, but it is important to know for sure.

The key to actually living closer to the healthy end of the spectrum is to do healthy things. That is easy enough to understand. But how do you actually know where you are on the spectrum? There is really only one way to know.

The only way to know how healthy you are is to assess your current health. There are many ways to do that. The best and most common ways to assess your health are:

- Going to the doctor for preventative check-ups
- Taking health risk assessments
- Keeping up your healthy habits

These 3 methods are pretty straight forward, but let’s take a look at how you can use them all to your advantage.

Preventative Check-ups

You’ve heard it since childhood, going to the doctor’s office is good for you. You may not have liked it, but you went anyway. The reason you went as a kid was to make sure you didn’t have anything wrong with you. Now that you are an adult, that reason still holds true. It’s not enough to assume everything is fine. You have to get checked out in order to know if something is wrong or not. Once you have done that, you will know that everything is fine.

Health Risk Assessments

In the corporate environment, health risk assessments are very common. They are a great way for companies to ensure that their employees are taking a look at their numbers. This is also a good way for the company to get a look at the health numbers of their employee population. The data is protected by law, so personal information is never shared with the company. They are only able to look at aggregate data, so employees don’t need to be concerned about their privacy. Most companies offer incentives for taking health assessments too. In the future, we will see more and more companies tying health assessments to the health plan and incentives will make significant impact on premiums and deductibles paid by employees.

Healthy Habits

It is important to know your numbers. Going to the doctor to get your check-up is a great start. If you know your current health and have received validation from your doctor, you can be sure that you are good…at least for now. The next step is the health assessment. This is a quick and easy way to get a snapshot of your current health numbers.

These options are essential. It is important to get check-ups and take health assessments each year, but they are only the results of what you’ve done over the course of year. If you don’t do anything to improve your health, it doesn’t matter what your numbers look like. In fact, you can be sure that they will keep getting worse year after year.

Using any of these 3 methods to know your numbers will help you plan your routine. Using all of these 3 methods will keep you on the right track. Being healthy is not just about being young. None of us is as young and healthy as we think we are. Without the habits, our health is on a steady decline from birth until death. It is important to actually know where you are on the spectrum of health. When was the last time you went to the doctor or took a health assessment? What does your health routine look like? All of these questions lead to one very important one: How healthy are you?

Health Doesn’t Just Happen

Health is something we all have. Each and every one of us has health. If you are alive, you have some degree of health. In fact, you were born with it. Everyone was given a clean slate to start life out and it was up to us to keep it or lose it.

The more stories I see about our nation’s health, the more I see that we are losing it. We are losing it rapidly, which brings me to the question: Are we even trying?
It would appear that most Americans have simply thrown in the towel and given up on their health. This just leads me to more questions:

What made them feel that there wasn’t any hope?
What made them think that they couldn’t live healthy?
What does it take for everyone to live healthy?

These questions are difficult to answer, but I feel like I see the answers to them every day. The answers may be difficult, but they are possible. In fact, they are only difficult at first. Once you are used to living this way, it becomes second nature and there is no problem sticking with it.

What makes people feel that there isn’t any hope of living healthy?
This question, as bleak as it sounds, is all too real. Many people have decided that health is not something that they can have. Many have given up on living a healthy lifestyle because they think it’s too hard, they don’t know what to do, or simply because they don’t think they are the “type of person” that can do it.

No matter what the reason, there is a huge problem arising from this mindset. The mindset is that they can’t do it, so why try? Why would they try if it’s not going to happen?

Every time we see one of the statistics about American obesity, it reminds people that they aren’t doing what they should be doing. Every time we share the guidelines on how much you should be exercising or what you should be eating regularly, people are reminded that they are not exercising enough and they are not eating the right foods. This is what makes people feel that there isn’t any hope. What happens when they see this? They just keep doing what they are doing because that’s what they know how to do.

What made people think they couldn’t live healthy?
This is a similar question t our first, but I want to clarify as I answer. The hopeless feeling people feel when they see that they are off track is painful. It is painful because it is often the first blow they receive when trying to get themselves going. Even if it is just a mental battle, it is difficult to overcome when you see how far you really have to go.

That is where the repeated blows come in. Every time you set out to do something, there will be some obstacles in your way. In health, there are many challenges that can be difficult to overcome. The more we try to overcome them without the proper support or without a clear game plan, it keeps getting harder and harder. Not only do we fall down on this path, but it gets more and more difficult to get backup as we see just how much further we really have to go in order to reach our goals.

When I mention goals, I am reminded of a bigger problem. In our society we are taught to set goals, but we are not taught how to set them. Everyone knows what a goal is and could tell you the reasons they are important. But very few are able to set them and reach them on a regular basis.

In health, the goal is simple, at least it seems that way. Be healthy seems to be what we all want to do. For some it’s to lose weight. For others it is quitting smoking. The point is, we have these broad, general goals that no one has any real way to measure. The more you try to reach these broken goals, the more you fail and the more difficult it gets to try again.

What does it take for everyone to live healthy?
This is not a difficult question. It feels like it may be a challenge to answer, given all problems we have with health, but it is not. Health is simple. Living healthy is nothing more than doing healthy things more than you do unhealthy things. It is difficult to do this when you think that you can’t. It is difficult to make changes when you don’t know how or feel that they are not possible for you to make.

That is the first change that has take place: We have to believe that we can do it. Health is within the reach of every person on the planet. No matter how long you have been telling yourself that you are stuck in a certain way, you can change. You can live healthy.

Believe
The next change that has to take place is the actual process of living healthy. It starts with habits. If you can develop healthy habits, you will live healthy. It doesn’t have to happen overnight, in fact, it rarely does.

Set Goals
This brings us to realistic goals. Set small goals and make small changes. As you take small steps, you will achieve small pieces of success. These pieces will help you get used to the habit of succeeding. Set goals as the actions you will take. The rest will take care of itself and you will keep doing it because it feels good. You have more energy and a sense of accomplishment, so there is no reason to go back to any other way of doing things.
Do it

The goals you set are your goals, which means two things:

1. You can do what you want and how you want to do it.
2. No one else can do it for you. Only you can make it happen

The best part about health is that we are in control. You can set goals and achieve whatever you want to. You can lose weight, quit smoking, exercise, eat vegetables and everything else that leads to good health. That is the good news.

The bad news (or we can call it the “real news”) is that if you don’t take action, nothing happens. Nothing changes if you don’t make it change. When it comes to health, nothing happens on its own. You have to do it. That means asking how things are prepared at restaurants if you are uncertain. It means shopping and cooking. It means planning ahead. It means setting time aside for yourself to get some exercise. It may even mean doing less of some things that you are comfortable with and more of some things that you are not as comfortable with.

No matter what your goals are, no matter where you are starting from or want to go, you have to be the one to do it. You have to put in the effort that it takes to live healthy. You have to make it happen. In other words, health doesn’t just happen.

The Lesser of Two Evils is Still Evil

When we think of fast food, we think of grease, fat and just plain bad food. Well, at least when we talk about fast food, that is what we say. It is hard for me to believe that people really dislike it when I see a full drive-thru every time I pass a restaurant.

No matter what time of day you go by, there will be a line around the building at every fast food joint you see. Morning, noon and night, people line up for it. Breakfast, lunch and dinner, we have to have our fast food.

How did this start? Well, the key word is fast. I understand the concept of getting food quickly and how that can make the day feel easier. I understand the concept of not making your own food and somehow feeling like you are still getting what you need.

That is where we have gone astray. When you eat fast food, you are not getting what your body needs. It is easy, it is quick, but is not complete. I don’t need to tell you about what you are getting. The calories, the fat and the sodium speak for themselves. You can see that just by looking at the food.

What we miss is the nutrients that real food provides. That is the scary part. We don’t get any of the vitamins or minerals that keep us going. In order to function at a high level, we need so much more. With a fast food diet, we are barely getting by from day to day. Yet, we still do it.

One thing that has me even more upset is the marketing machine. Fast food is fast food. The burger and fries have always been the burger and fries. They don’t claim to be healthy. They don’t try to sell you on their health benefits or make you think they are good for you. They simply taste good and that is all they need.

There is a new wave of restaurants that is trying to tell you something different. You’ve heard the slogan “Eat Fresh”. You’ve seen calorie comparisons and comical views of people eating too much fast food and popping out of their close or breaking chairs. Who is showing this to you? The people that are making food that is no better. The people showing you this information simply want you to eat their unhealthy food rather than someone else’s unhealthy food.

A sub sandwich, while the calorie total may be slightly lower than a burger by volume is a misleading choice. The content of a sub can tell you more than just the total calories. Think about sodium and fat for starters. Often, they put cheese, sauces and fatty meats on the sub which gives you more than enough fat and sodium. They also use white bread, or “wheat” bread that is the same only a little darker. This doesn’t give you any satisfaction or nourishment. The additives and preservatives are another story altogether. Let’s just say that your body is either working really hard to break this stuff down, or it basically going right through you without you absorbing much.

Why do we eat this stuff? Well, it does look better than a burger. It has less fat and at least you can try to put more vegetables on it. Given the choice, I suppose it is the lesser of two evils, but the fact remains: fast food is evil.

With choices like this, how can we see it as anything else? You can choose between bad or worse. When it comes to making choices about what we eat, there should be something better. What happened to good? Oh yeah, there is also a restaurant telling us to “eat good” by going there. This is not even a better choice. It is just using the word good. When it comes to fast food, good has nothing to do with healthy.

The real problem is that food has nothing to do with health. When we go through our day, we are just getting by. The options that are right in front of us are the options we choose. The fast food companies know this, which is why they keep pounding the message home: eat more of this…please!

Just because it is convenient, doesn’t mean that it is easy in the long-run. Just because it is cheap, doesn’t mean that it won’t cost you in the long-run. No matter how good they say it is, make them prove it to you. Take a closer look at what you eat and remember that if you can get it in a drive-thru, it can’t be that good for you.

Sure, you can find options that may be a bit better. It may not be as bad, but remember what you are comparing it to. Fast food is fast food. There may be degrees of poor quality and unhealthy ingredients, but if you truly want to live healthy, this can’t be your idea of a healthy choice.

Is it better to eat a grilled chicken sub than a burger? Yes it is. Is it healthy to eat grilled chicken subs every day? Probably not. That is the real message here. Making a healthy choice is a good thing. The problem is that fast food has many of us fooled into thinking we are making healthy choices. What we are really doing is choosing the lesser of two evils. Guess what, we are still choosing an evil.

Set Real Goals for Real Success

We all have goals. At least we all have things we want to achieve. What is the difference? There is actually a big difference between a goal and something you want. Something you want can become a goal, but you have to make it a goal.

It takes a specific action in order to achieve something. There are the steps it takes to start moving in the direction you need to move. There are the many challenges that you will have to overcome and finally there are the ideas that you will need to generate in order to solve these problems and continue to progress despite the many challenges you face.

If you just want something, you can’t possibly go through these steps. It takes more than wanting something to start making changes, analyze and overcome challenges. It
takes more than just wanting something to achieve it.

What does it take? It takes a goal. Actually it takes a series of goals that will take you progressively through the steps you need to create new habits and change your lifestyle. But it all starts with one goal. If you have a goal, just one goal, you can achieve anything you want to achieve.

I know this may sound quite dreamy and even a little “pie in the sky”, but in fact it is the exact opposite. The dream is for you to think that by wanting something you can have it. By simply wanting, hoping and wishing, you can and even feel that you should have something. That is the mindset that many people have these days and it is leading us down the wrong path.

What path is that? Well, health is my thing. I think it, talk it and live it every day. Naturally, the path I am talking about is the health of the average person. I don’t have to site statistics or show you any scary details about what is happening right now. You know as well as I do that our country is suffering from many epidemics that we have brought on ourselves. We brought them on ourselves despite knowing exactly what we need to do to stop them.

We can prevent everything we are dealing with if we can change our mindset. Right now our mindset is something like this:

“I want to live a healthy lifestyle.”
“I want to look and feel good.”
“I want to live a long and happy life.”
“I want to hear good news when I go to the doctor.”
“I only want to see the doctor for routine check-ups to make sure everything is STILL GOOD.”

These are all great things to want. They are even great things to say. They are statements that we are all saying every day. Unfortunately, they are rarely goals. They are nothing more than statements about things we want. The things we want are important, but at this point, they don’t seem to be important enough to achieve.

We all want to make these statements true. What will it take to start achieving these things and making them true? It will take goals. Each of these statements is an opportunity to set a goal. A goal is nothing more than a destination or a point that you desire to reach. In health it may be a weight, size or simply a feeling. It can also be a specific number of days, hours or even minutes of exercise. A goal can be eating a certain food or not eating at a certain restaurant. No matter what you want to achieve, there is a goal that can help you achieve it.

What happens if we don’t set real goals? Well, that is even more simple that when we do set goals. There are very few options here. When you don’t have a goal, you don’t succeed. That is all there is to it. Can you take a trip without a destination?

Well, you can certainly drive around, but until you decide where you are going, you aren’t really going anywhere. Don’t get me wrong, when it comes to life, I am an “enjoy the journey” person. I am certainly enjoying the ride as I go, but I am on my way to somewhere that will bring me great satisfaction.

This is where most people get hung up and give up on their goals. They look at the destination and feel like it is too far away to reach. It is easier to say, “I would love to be there.” but it is more challenging to say, “I want to be there and I will take action in order to get there.”

That is the difference between wanting something and having a goal. When you have a goal, you have a plan to get something. When you just want something, you are not taking the steps needed to actually get it. You have to want something before you can decide to take action, so it is a good thing when you can identify something you want.

When you want something enough, you will take the steps necessary to get it. When you really want to achieve something, you will set a goal to get started in that direction. The most common mistake that people make is trying to look at each achievement as something that they have to do in one step or with one goal. Actually, most habits are many goals wrapped into an entire series of habits. Once you set one goal and start making progress, you can handle each challenge as it comes. If you just sit back and hope that something will happen, you will keep seeing the whole picture and it will never appear to get easier. It will always look like this big daunting thing that you don’t think you can realistically achieve.

Once you can set a goal, even one goal, you are able to start breaking down each thing you want and taking it step by step. Nothing worth doing is easy. I’m not going to sit here and tell you that living healthy is easy and you should be able to do it with no problems. That would be mean and would actually keep you in the mindset that it can’t be done.

In fact, that is happening all over the country as we speak. Someone just read another article or saw another report on what they should be doing. The remembered that they are not doing it and it felt even further from reality when they saw yet another story about how they should be able to do it. The reality is, we know what we should be doing. We know what we can do and we want to do it, but we are not doing it because we have yet to go beyond wanting.

We are still making statements about what we want, but we are not taking action. Once you take action, you can take statements like this:

“I want to live a healthy lifestyle.”
“I want to look and feel good.”

You can turn these statements into real action. The difference between wanting and doing is the practice of setting a goal. These statements can be goals with some slight adjustments. They could look like these instead:

“I am going to exercise before work on one day.”
“I am going to bring lunch from home a few days this week so that I don’t eat fast food everyday.”

These statements are simple. They don’t take a ton of effort, but they will make a big impact on your lifestyle. If you can make these statements, you are on the right track to setting real goals. If you can make these statements true, you are achieving those goals and succeeding.

What is the difference between simply wanting something and actually achieving it? It comes back to goals. Wanting something is great. We all want things in life. Some of us are getting what we want, while others just keep on wanting. The only difference is goals. Setting a goal means that you are actually going to do something to get what you want. If you set a goal and reach a goal, you are succeeding. So when you break it down, setting real goals leads to real success.

Marketing Wellness Internally

With healthcare costs on the rise, many businesses are trying to improve employee health through wellness programs. Employee engagement is the biggest factor in the success or failure of a wellness program, but it is often difficult to get employees engaged.

The fact is your employees want to be healthy. They want to change and they will change if structure is there to support their health. How do you engage your employees? It’s the same concept that your business uses to get customers engaged. It’s all about marketing.

You have to help your customers understand why they need your product or service. You have to make sure that your customers are aware of your product or service. You have to help them understand the value. You even have to support them to make sure that they are educated on your product or service so they know how to purchase and how to use it properly.

The same principles apply to wellness. You have to help your employees understand the need for changes in health in order to improve your company’s healthcare costs. You have to make sure that they are aware of the control they have over their health and the effects on their costs. You have to support them to make sure that they are educated on health so that they can participate and be successful.

Just like your customers want to use your product or service, your employees want to participate in wellness programs. Your business is successful because you are filling an important need for your customers. Your employees have an important need too. They have a need to be healthy. By applying the same tactics, you can successfully market your wellness program to your employees and they will buy in.

When employee needs are in line with company needs, it makes sense to make the investment. Just as you make an investment to keep your clients happy, investing in your employees is a good idea. Clients continue to be paying customers because they are happy. Employees continue to be good workers when they are happy and healthy, which also keeps your company moving in the right direction. In fact, with more energy employees can be more productive. With better health, they cost your company less while providing even better results.

Marketing to your customers is all about communication and understanding their needs. As you listen and provide quality, they buy in and everyone is happy. Marketing wellness to your employees has the same affect. Wellness is going to keep your good people doing good work and save your company money, which will keep your company on the path to success.

The key is to communicate the message to your employees in order to get them engaged. When customers are engaged, your business will be successful. Marketing helps you achieve that success. You also need employees to be engaged for your business to be successful and internal marketing is the key.

Practice Makes Perfect

When you learn a new skill, you know that the more you do it the better you will be at it. As children, we learned many skills and practiced quite often to make sure that we continued to get better. We may have experienced some frustration, but we didn’t get discouraged to the point where we quit. If we wanted to get better, we just kept on practicing.

Now, much of this was built for us through the structure of activities we were doing. Whether it was a sport, a musical instrument or a particular subject in school, there was always another practice, lesson or class that forced us to keep working on the skill. No matter how frustrated we were, we had to get up the nerve to show up the next day to work on it again.

It’s a shame we don’t have teachers or coaches to keep us focused on our health. Well, we do, but the majority of people are choosing not to use us. That is not a cheap shot or a plug for myself, it just the nature of the way people look at their health. The fact of the matter is, most people don’t look at health as a set of skills that can be improved with practice.

Maybe we should start looking at it like that. Maybe if we looked at health like we looked at learning to ride a bike or learning to play our favorite sport, we would understand that we got better at it the more we practiced. More importantly, we would realize that health is not only possible, but it is much easier the better we get at it.

The more you ride a bike, the less you have to think about the fundamentals. Think about the most basic skills we have and how little we actually think about them. Riding a bike is one example I like to se because I can remember the steps it took to go from a big wheel to training wheels to a mini-bike to a regular bike. It took a long time to make that progression and there were a few skinned knees and even a few tears. I remember thinking after a few falls that it may never happen. Despite this feeling of frustration and failure, I still knew that I was going to have to try again. The next day would come around and guess what: I was back out there trying to get on those two wheels.

No matter how difficult it was, I knew that I had to do it. I feel the same way about health today. No matter what obstacles stand in my way, I will do the things that lead to a healthy lifestyle. I will always exercise. I will always watch my diet and eat good food. I will never smoke and the stress that is in my life will be managed so that the whole of my routine is healthy. The only difference between now and then is that I’ve been doing it for so long that it comes naturally, just like riding a bike.

I don’t have to spend too much time thinking about food or wondering when I’m going to exercise. I don’t have to try to quit smoking or get a handle on an out of control routine that brings me down day after day. That is what many people are trying to do today. They are living unhealthy lifestyles and are trying to change that. It is not easy, but they can do it too.

If we can start looking at health as a set of skills, we can live healthy without the feeling that we can’t do what we need to do in order to live healthy. It is easy for someone that is out of practice to say that it can’t be done. It will be more difficult the longer it has been, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t be done.

Let’s go back to our bike scenario. The process of learning how to ride a bike was not easy and it didn’t happen overnight. And we didn’t already have a skill and simply forgot it. We started from square one, not knowing how to do it at all and we figured out what we had to do. Once we figured it out, we still had to practice and practice until we were able to ride a bike. Now we can jump on a bike, no matter how long it has been, and we can ride it comfortably. We may not be as good as when we were riding a bike every day, but that is the point. The more you do something, the better you get at it and the easier it becomes. In other words, practice makes perfect.

Plan B is Better than Nothing

It’s easy to get upset when things to go according to plan. In life, many things we plan get altered and many plans change as we go along. This is part of life. No one can avoid it, but you certainly can drive yourself crazy if you try.

Health is part of life too and planning is part of a healthy life. If you are going to live healthy, you have to plan. If you plan, you are going to have to make adjustments and find new ways to do things. If not you will drive yourself crazy while struggling to make the progress you want to make.

The most successful people in life are able to adjust and continue moving forward despite changing circumstances. Health is no different. Those living healthy or “healthy people” are able to eat healthy foods, exercise and take good care of themselves in all circumstances. Some are just so rigid that they won’t go or do anything outside of their health-zone, but those people are few and far between.

For the record, I am not one of those people. I always try to emphasize this just to make sure you know where I stand. I am a “healthy person” (I better be with all the advice I give!), but I am not healthy because I live a freakish life of strict training routines and a steady diet of rabbit food grown in my own garden. I am healthy because I am able to embrace change and adjust when I need to.

Changes are taking place all around us. As these changes occur, plans are difficult to stick with. At least the first plan is anyway. The first plan is often the best laid and most detailed plan that we are certain is the way to get us where we want to go. The first plan, or plan A as it is often called, is the “right way” or the way we picture things taking place.

Plan A is not always what actually happens. Plan A is a picture in our mind that exists only before we get started. Plan A, even when written down will have notes and adjustments on it by the time we are actually in motion. At least that is the case if you are successful.

Let me explain: being successful is not getting to a certain amount of money, living in a certain house or driving a certain car. Life has showed me that you can be happy in any class, neighborhood or car. Being successful in health or living healthy is more than just the number of calories and the minutes spent exercising. Health Coaching has shown me that you can be healthy with many different methods and patterns and by eating in many different ways.

So what is success? My definition of success makes it more of a process. Success for me is a journey and not a destination. Why is this? Well, if you have to get to a certain place in order to be successful, than it is automatically going to take more time or effort for some.

Let’s say success is Miami Florida. If being healthy is getting to Miami, than someone in Seattle is going to have a much longer journey toward health than someone in Fort Lauderdale. That doesn’t mean that they can’t get there or that everyone is automatically as healthy as their origin. That’s not the case at all. People change all the time. I’ve seen thousands change their lifestyle and therefore change their health.

That is why my definition of success is about the process or the journey that you are on. Success for me is setting goals and reaching goals. If you are reaching a goal, you are successful. If you continue to set and reach goals you will continue to be successful because you will keep moving toward your desired destination.

In health, success is as simple as action. Take action and you will be healthy and successful. Everyone has a different journey, which is why you need to set your own goals and take your own steps in order for this to work. You are successful as long as you are on your journey. The journey may be long, or it may be short. It may be very difficult, or it may be easy. The point is, you have to have goals and set up a plan in order to even get started on your journey.

How do you get started on the journey? It’s all about the plan. If you have a plan for your life, you can get the job you want, the house and car you want. If you have a plan for your health, you can look, feel and perform the way you want to. You just need a plan.

It does get a bit more complicated than that. As you know, life always presents changes and makes us adjust. What happens when we can’t adjust? We fail.
That is where the most important plan comes into play. It’s not plan A, it’s more like the plan that comes to be when plan A doesn’t work. The most important plan is the one that you can use. If plan A doesn’t work, we have to come up with a new plan or change the existing plan in order to succeed.

That is why plan B is better so important. It is often the difference between getting any exercise or eating anything for lunch. Plan B is what you do in real life. You can draw up the best plan A in the history of mankind, but if it doesn’t fit into your life, it will not work.

That is where most of us meet our demise. Plan A looks great, so we set out with that sparkling plan and on Monday morning and as soon as the alarm goes off. Then real life starts and your plan A goes right out the window. This is a problem considering plan A is all we had. It was the end-all plan that was sure to take us to the top, so when it failed, what did we do? We quit and assumed that there was nothing else we could do. If this plan didn’t work, what will?

The plan that will work is the plan that actually fits into your lifestyle. That may be plan B or it may even be plan C or D. I’ve seen people succeed on plan Q as long as they executed it. The point is, most people make plan A and assume it will work. When it doesn’t there is nowhere to go. The journey ends there. It’s like getting on the road toward Miami, running out of gas and choosing not to fill up the car.
When you set out on a road trip, you know that you can’t make it in one tank of gas. You know that when you see the fuel light, you will need to look for a place to fill up. That is part of the trip and you build that right in.

Changing your lifestyle in one sweeping step with a “perfect plan” crafted from nothing but expecting it to bring you the perfect routine is just like setting out on a cross-country trip and expecting to get there on one tank of gas. It sounds silly, but that is what many people try to do in their routines.

Life may be complicated. Health, being part of life, is no different. There will always be something keeping you from the gym. There will always be something that throws your schedule off. There will always be something to make your ‘plan A’ a big challenge.

The solution is simple: Don’t rely on Plan A. It’s good to have a plan, but it’s better to be ready for adjustment and able to put plan B into motion. It doesn’t mean you failed at plan A, it just means that you needed to adjust in order to keep going on your journey.

Running out of gas on your trip doesn’t feel like a failure. So, why does getting stuck at the office or having a crisis in the morning feel like failure? On the trip, we simply pull off, fill up and get back on our way. At home, we see that plan A is no longer possible and we give up.

In reality, which is where healthy living takes place, you need to have a plan B. Plan B is not failure. Plan B is not even secondary. Plan B may become plan A when you realize that the original plan was drawn up with great intensions but simply doesn’t work for you. Again, this is not failing. It is simply adjusting.

In health, the only failure is doing nothing. As long as you have goals to do something for your health, you are succeeding every time you do those things. If plan B is what it takes to do those, do it. Not having a plan B or refusing to come up with one is easy. It’s easy to do nothing, but won’t bring you success. Plan B will bring you success. In health, something is better than nothing. The more you do that, the better you will become at it. As you practice, this becomes your habit and keeps you going. Something is always better than nothing. If plan B is what it takes for you to do something, than isn’t it better than nothing?

Personal Pride

When it comes to health, it is easy to let external influences get in the way. There are many obstacles to living healthy. Just take a typical day for example: you have to get ready for work, go to work, you are busy all day at work, you have to get home from work and do any number of household and family activities before getting to bed so you can get up and do it all over again.

If you are anything like me, this routine takes its toll on your mind and body. We all have a routine that we are in. It may be more or less hectic that what we have described, but no matter what you are doing, it is important.

This is your life. You have to do what you are doing in order to make a living and support your family. You have to keep everything organized so your family can do what it wants to do and sometimes you just have to make sure you don’t go crazy.

There are many reasons we do what we do every day. There is money, respect, entertainment and many other factors that drive our activities. As I see health take a back seat, I wonder why. I wonder why people can justify running themselves ragged on a daily basis without even considering their health.

When most people describe a typical day, it looks like above with a million things going on. I know how it is because I am dealing with a schedule like that every day too. I have to balance many things just like everyone else. I have to prioritize and decide what I have time for and what I don’t. More accurately, I have to decide when I have to do things to make sure that they fit.

But how do you know what you want to fit? I use a few things to gage how important something is. We are all motivated by different things. You can talk about money, fear or personal fulfillment. You can talk about any number of things that will get people to do something, but I think we need to think about one in particular.

Personal pride is what keeps me focused on my health. No matter what I have going on, there is time for health. I make time for workouts, for buying and preparing food, managing my stress and many other things during a typical day. The reason I do this is because of personal pride.

There are few ways that pride comes into play for me, so let’s discuss what it means to be proud to live healthy. Pride comes from many places and here are the places I get mine:

Success

When you set a goal and reach a goal, you are successful. The more goals you set and reach, the more successful you are. No matter how big or small a goal is, if you reach it, you are experiencing success. This habit has become part of my daily life. I set goals every day and I take pride in reaching the goals I set. I take pride in being successful.

Results

The results you get from your day to day life depend on your actions. The goals I set are clear and the results I get by reaching them are too. I take great pride in controlling those results. I control results by controlling my actions. It’s that simple and I will always do it. When I am deciding what actions I want to take, I think about the results and I remember that my personal pride will be greater when I take action and get those results.

Control

Health is in our hands. I can decide how I will live and I decide how I feel each day. When I wake up in the morning, I am tired. I feel like the day just started, but I wasn’t ready for it to start. I feel like the night wasn’t long enough. My routine is designed to stop that feeling and help me get on track for a successful day. My morning workout is what gives me the energy to have a good morning. The goal of getting up and going is all it takes (most days) to take action. I take pride in accomplishing that goal to start each day and the rest of my day is on track because of it.

There are many other decisions that I make on a daily basis that determines how healthy that day, week, month, year will be. As these add up, I am determining how healthy my life will be. I have decided that I want to be successful; I want a certain result- to be healthy and feel good every day and have the control to do all of this.

I am proud of my accomplishments day in and day out. I am proud of the clients that have been able to do the same thing. They aren’t doing it so I will be proud of them. They do it because they have their own personal pride. Anyone that is living healthy has decided that their pride is strong enough for them to set goals, take action to succeed and maintain control over their lives.

The same can be said for those that are not living healthy. If you are not able to find time or make decisions that will support your health, you are not finding pride in being healthy. It’s no surprise. It would be difficult to take pride in being healthy when you are not doing it. But that doesn’t mean you can’t do it.

Living healthy may not be easy, but if you are willing to start with one step, you can take pride in that one step and keep doing it. The more success you have with that step, the closer you are to taking another. Step by step, you will be successful, see the results you want and realize that you are in control of your life. You won’t stop because you will have something that you didn’t have before you started taking these steps. You’ll have something very powerful that will keep you going. You will have personal pride.

The Rewards of Living Healthy

Living healthy is not easy. Health is a big challenge, but the greater the challenge in life, the greater the reward. We were built to seek and overcome challenges in our lives. Health is no different and it. No matter how difficult it may seem, it is not only possible, but very rewarding as well.

There are many rewards that come from living a healthy lifestyle. These rewards come from the effort you are willing to put in. The more you give, the more you get. It’s that simple. The more you get, the better you feel. This is a also a simple concept to understand, yet it can be difficult to put into practice. Why else would so many people be choosing to ignore their health or have such a hard time taking control of it?

The problems we keep hearing about are very real. They are being experienced by millions right now and it seems there is no end to them in sight. The problems may be real, but so are the rewards. That is the rewards: believing that you can reach them.
Health often feels difficult and in many cases it is difficult. Once you have struggled for a while or seen a few attempts fail, it is easy to give up. It is easy to lose sight of why you are trying to do this. Why are you trying to live healthy? I suspect that you are doing it for the rewards. If you are, you are more likely to succeed. The list of rewards below is just a few of the positives that come from living healthy. Let’s break each reward down so you can see what it really does for you when you achieve them.

Satisfaction

This is a simple concept, but it often gets misconstrued. Satisfaction is really why we do anything, right? If you accomplish something, you are satisfied. If you are satisfied with something, you likely wanted to do it and will continue to do it. Living healthy somehow gets left out of this equation despite the level of satisfaction you can achieve.

So, how does health bring you satisfaction? Well, for starters, you know that you are focused on the most important thing in your life. In fact, you are focused on your life itself. There is no other task that is more important for you to complete. Each time you do something for your health, you get that satisfaction. The more you do it, the more you can be satisfied that you are doing it.

Confidence

Confidence is a key component in any area. Confidence can mean the difference between success and failure. If you are trying to get into a new routine, it takes confidence just to get started. Without confidence, you can’t get started and you certainly can’t get the results you want.

The best part about confidence is that it carries over. When you build confidence by mastering skills in one area, it can help you do the same in other areas. As you get started and keep a good routine going, you can take pride knowing that you are accomplishing goals and getting positive results. These results will help you feel good when setting goals in other areas such as social, business/work and even romance. I know that being a parent is easier when you are used to getting your routine done and with the energy that comes with it. And in true cyclical fashion, as you become more confident in those other areas, you can continue to grow more and more confidence for more and more success.

Success

Success is what it’s all about. Everything we do in life is held up as successful or unsuccessful. When you set out to do anything, no matter what it is, you want to be successful. When you try to get into a healthy routine, you want to be successful. That is the only way that you are going to be getting what you want.
The definition of success is setting a goal and reaching a goal. In health, you can set any goal you want to set. It can be as complex as a lifelong dream of completing a marathon or as simple as going for a walk after work. If you set a goal and reach it, you are succeeding. This becomes a habit as you do it more and more. Success leads to more success as you make setting and reaching goals your habit.

Personal Fulfillment

The above categories all have something in common. They all have to do with what you get out of living healthy. True, that is what we are talking about, but they all add up to one thing. The one thing that you get when you put all of the categories together is personal fulfillment. As you gain all of these things, you realize that you are doing great things and that is fulfilling.

Control

Why do we want to live healthy? Well, the above reasons certainly help. They are what we gain mentally and emotionally, but health, while all-encompassing, shows itself physically. We notice health or its absence when the body breaks down or doesn’t do what you want it to do. That doesn’t have to happen if you don’t want it to happen.

Health is control. By taking action and focusing on your routine, you are taking control of your health and taking control of your life. The diseases that we read about and the statistics that we hope we won’t be dealing with are all preventable. You can decide to live above all of it and that is certainly one of the positives you gain by taking care of your health.

All five of these areas are important and you will enjoy them when you get there. Each area is different and may hold different weight depending on where you are coming from. No matter what you set out to achieve, it is important that you get something of personal value to you. These areas are of great value and they can give you many reasons to live healthy.

The most important thing to remember is that you are at the root of all of these reasons. From satisfaction to control and everything in between, you are gaining knowledge about yourself and learning what you are capable of. We are all capable of living healthy. When we choose to do it, we gain some amazing rewards.