Healthy Life BlogTips For Living a Healthy Lifestyle

When I say that I don’t have time to do something, I’m really saying that it’s not a priority. I had to catch myself in the act last night saying that I did not have time to do something and correct myself to say it was not a priority. We externalize everything like we are the victim of some unseen person that give some people more time than others.  The truth is that we all have the same 24 hour day and how we choose to use our time is our choice.  Instead of externalizing a problem we should internalize it.  So instead of saying I don’t have time, I should say it’s not a priority.  I wonder how much our life would change if we just made this distinction.  I think that some of the important things in life would not be neglected because your making a problem a personal choice.  When I say I don’t have time to exercise, I am making myself feel better because I’m not responsible, but to say that exercise is not a priority is to place the responsibility with me and I’m likely to do it because it is important to me.  I believe the same could be said for money. When I don’t invest in my business because I don’t have enough money, I really mean that other things are more important.  If I don’t have the money then my priority should be to pay my house first, but when it comes to things like cable TV or computer games, I’m saying that these things are more important than growing my business.
So from this day forward I vow to to replace the words I don’t have time/money/energy/[insert limited asset here] with it’s not a priority so that I will be aware of what I really mean and make decisions accordingly.  What are some of the situations that you have experienced where you would have acted differently or chosen another option if you just changed those words?  Leave some comments and let me know what you think.

Seeing as my last entry was about why diets don’t work, lets look at how to change our eating habits. Like I said in the previous article, some diet plans can be a good platform to get started but I would not say that it is necessary. So let’s get started.

Portion Control is probably the number one problem with our nutrition. I’ve talked about how to overcome eating to much and I still struggle to control this problem. Why is it such a problem? I believe that eating has become recreational. I’m not saying that it’s not ok to enjoy a meal but we need to remember that food is a need, not a form of entertainment. Here are a couple of other tips that can help to avoid overeating.

1. Eating slowly can give your body time to tell you mind that you are full.
2. Making less food will allow you to clean your plate without overeating. For those of us who grew up thinking it was good to be part of the clean plate club, this helps a lot.
3. Using the Rule of halves will keep you from eating too much at restaurants. Just eat half of what is put in front of you.
4. Don’t starve yourself. When I’m really hungry I eat too quickly and end up eating too much.

As much as a like eating out, I hate to say that eating out is a problem. Real cooking seems to be a lost art in America. When I say cooking, I don’t mean opening a can or a supper in a box. Cooking your meal is a great way to control the ingredients that you use in your meals. Eating out or meals in a box from the grocery store don’t give you control.

Lastly, it’s important to eat the right kinds of foods. I heard a wise man, Mike Huckabee, say that he tries not to eat any thing that was not around 100 years ago. This is a great Idea, because it keeps you from a lot of processed foods and points to whole grains, meats, fruits and vegetables. Remember to have a reasonable treat every now and again; it will help to keep you from “falling off the wagon”. I hope this article gives you some practical helpful tips to change the way you look at food. We don’t want to diet. We want to change our eating habits. Do you have comments or Ideas to help? Leave a comment and let us know.

1. Diets often imply a beginning and end.  There is no beginning or end to healthy eating. If you need to loose weight, your nutritional habits need to change permanently. The common diet cycle consists of living on a plan until you reach your goal and then just going back to your former habits.

2. Diets are not realistic long term. You can not always control what foods are available and how they are prepared, so the steamed cabbage and beets diet is shot as soon as you leave the house.  It is unrealistic to think that you can simply limit your intake to a certain type of food forever; not to mention it is rarely healthy to neglect other food groups.

3. Diets often choose speed over health. I’ve seen many advertisements that tout quick results with little work.  These results may come on quick but the pounds come back quickly as well. I would take slower, lasting results over quick and fleeting results. Remember it’s not a race and diets that limit intake and limit the foods you can eat too much will often cause binging

4. Diets can rely on products like prepackaged meals or pills, but don’t teach one to eat healthy. The old saying goes, “give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day, but teach a man to fish he’ll eat for a lifetime.”  It is more important to learn to make healthy choices and eat the right amount of food than immediate results. Take the time to learn what to eat and how much of it to eat so that no matter where you go or what restaurant you eat at, you will always make the right choices.

5. Diets don’t address lifestyle.  Most diets don’t cause a lifestyle change. If you can change the way you look at and consume food you will win.  It’s not to say that diets are all bad, but it is important to see them for what they are.  I won’t say that a diet will never work and they can even be a good start off point for a lifestyle change. I hate to say it but there are no magic bullets.  Hard work and discipline produce results and every journey starts with one step.  Lets take one step at a time toward healthy living.  As always, your comments are welcome. Please tell me what you think.

1. Negativity

Don’t be a victim of negative thinking. It is really easy to get caught up in thinking that we can’t do it or that it will not make a difference. If you make the effort and focus on making a lifestyle change, not just a means to an end, you will be successful. Negativity can come from others just as much as from you. Don’t listen to others when they start making negative comments. I’ve had people tell me how running can cause joint problems and give all kinds of reasons why they can’t do it and I just tell them that they can do it to.

2. Unrealistic expectations

To think that I’m going to be able to run 10 miles or create a perfect budget when starting out is unrealistic. When you want to change you lifestyle, it’s best to start slow and expect a long track. I’ve heard it said over and again, “there is no short cut to any place worth going.” You want to change your lifestyle instead of just changing behavior for a while. It takes discipline and work, but I can guarantee that it’s worth it.

3.Frustration

We’ve all experienced frustration when doing something difficult. It’s important to stick with your plan no matter what. Try to surround yourself with positive, encouraging people who can help you to stay on track when frustration sets in. Accountability is you best friend. It’s also good to have a healthy release, something you enjoy doing that can help release frustration and get you back on track. For me it’s running, it could be anything but I try to make sure that I find healthy activities like reading, exercising or interacting with friends and family.

4. Denial

I’m not talking about a river in Egypt. It’s important to be honest with yourself when you access you lifestyle. When in doubt ask someone close to you, they will be honest and have your best interest in mind. I can often catch myself in denial by what I say and the excuses I make. When you have to make excuses to justify something than chances are it does not belong.

5. Lack of Personal Responsibility

Who is to blame for your situation? In all or some capacity, you are responsible for your situation. I hear a lot of people talking about how someone else did something to put them in that situation or the economy is responsible for them not being able to make a payment. I challenge everyone to look to themselves first. If I can’t make that payment, maybe it’s because I chose to spent money somewhere else. Instead of asking why someone is not helping you, ask why I have not helped myself. I have seen people who have chose a different situation despite their environment. You can too.

6. Ignorance

If you don’t know what a healthy life looks like, you won’t know how to get there. Take the time to learn new things and consider new ideas, read a book or two. It’s amazing how your perspective changes when you know more about any topic. Knowledge is power.

The 12 steppers define insanity as doing the same thing over and expecting a different result. Join me and put these obstacles behind us so we can live health, full lives.

America is being killed one bite at a time because we have been taught at a very early age to always clean your plate. This was fine when you were sitting at home and did not want to finish you vegetables, but today we are fighting against growing portions in restaurants and poor quality in commercially prepared food. How do we fight this growing problem? I’ll tell you first hand, it’s not easy.

While looking at the CNN website, I took a quiz that compares the portions of yesteryear with the portions of today. I was not shocked to find that everything we eat today is bigger, but I did not realize that it was that much bigger. A bagel has gone from 3 inches in diameter and 140 calories to 350 calories and 6 inches in diameter, a cheese burger has almost doubled in calories and a bowl of pasta has sky rocketed from 500 calories to over 1000 calories. Why have portions changed so drastically from two decades ago? Have we demanded that we get more food in our meals?

How can one overcome this issue? The core comes back to you and me. It takes self control and discipline to walk into a restaurant and order and meal and just eat half. I’ve seen both sides of the plate and one’s better. I’ve come up with a couple tips for eating out that might be helpful.

1. Go into the restaurant with idea that you will be limiting you meal. I tell myself that I’m only going to eat half and take the rest home for later. If I wait until I’m full, it’s too late.
2. I try to stay away from all you can eat buffets at all costs. This is just an open invitation to eat too much. I also feel pressure to eat more to get my moneys worth. It’s best just to steer clear.
3. Skip the appetizer, bread, chips or whatever. Cheap filler will fill you up and then you’ll still eat you meal because that’s what you paid for.
4. Drink water. This will save loads of money and calories. Drinks are outrageous in price, two dollars for a glass of tea or soda. I’ll pass.
5. Whenever possible, just go home and eat. It will save a lot of money, you can control the ingredients and you can control the portions. Cooking is fun but I can’t help with the dishes.

So next time you at a restaurant, keep in mind that what they put in front of, in most cases, is more food than anyone needs in one sitting. Do you fight this portion problem? How do you cope? Leave a comment and let me know.

Stephen Covey said “Time Management is actually a misnomer, time carries on despite us and we could
never manage it. But the challenge is not to manage time, but to manage ourselves.” How can we manage ourselves more effectively? Well after doing some reading and watching some videos, here are some of the ways I’ve found that can help to manage yourself.

1. Stop Multitasking
I’ve found that when I try to do several things at once that the important things don’t get done as
quickly or as effectively. I’m really bad for having the TV on in the background while I work on the
computer and I notice a huge difference when I turn it off and focus on one thing. Now just to be clear, when I’m doing the dishes or mowing the lawn it’s OK for me to be listening to music or watching TV, It’s only when I do things that requires a lot of concentration or thought that I need to stop multitasking.

2. Avoid/Limit Distractions
It takes a person something like 20 minutes to get back into the rhythm of what they were doing when
they get distracted. I was shocked when I read this, but whether that time is accurate or not, your
time is valuable and should not be wasted. Often time, I think that we set ourselves up for distraction
by having e-mail notifications, Instant Messengers, text messages and all sorts of automatic alerts.
Set aside specific times to do things like check email or Instant Message.

3. web-surfing
I’m bad to go look something up online and then think while I’ve got my browser open let me go check
the news. This is a really bad habit of mine and it’s been hard to overcome. My goal when I sit down to
do something is to come prepared to do that task. You can open up all the required browser windows
ahead of time or if you don’t need to access the internet then simply don’t launch the browser at all.

4. Make it a Routine
Whether we know it or not we have routines that we follow everyday, I think that we are comfortable
with routine and naturally move toward it. I’ve found that if I make a routine of a certain task, it
takes the guess work out of what I should do. If you want to loose weight, make a routine of getting up in the morning and exercising. If you want to learn more, make it a routine to read every night before bed. Before you know it you’ll be reaching for that book or exercising without even thinking about it.

5. Be Intentional
To be successful in almost anything it’s important to be intentional, sure people can sometimes wander into success once or twice but the majority of the successful people take steps to get there. I’ve learned that if you want to loose weight or find a better job, take steps to get there, write our a plan and most of all take action.

These are just some of the things that I’ve learned about managing myself effectively. What are some of the things you do to help keep focused and manage yourself? Leave a comment below and let me know.

As I read the news, I can’t help but reflect on how much money affects our health. So in order to get healthy fiscally, it’s important to remember that “personal finance is 80% behavior and is only 20% head knowledge”, to quote Dave Ramsey. I’ve seen this in my life as I’ve gone from deep debt to
debt free. I would go as far to say that personal is more akin to weight loss than anything else. So here are some things that helped me get to a great place financially.
1. Get Organized
This was a huge step for me because I am not an organized person by nature. It’s important that all mail and bills are opened upon arrival and bills are stored where they can be found. I found it really helpful to schedule a time to look at bills weekly or bi weekly, for me it’s payday. I’ve also got one of those multi-layered trays and label them New, Pay and file. Obviously new means new mail, Pay is opened but need to be paid and file is paid and ready to file or shred.
2. Budget and stick to it
This is a tough subject. Budgeting is a key to financial success. It is important to write everything down every month and be thorough. I write down my income at the top of the page and give every dollar a name. I spent a long time writing down just the bills and whatever was leftover just got spent. I
would have never gotten anywhere if I kept on that track. After expenses, I just give everything else a name whether it’s blow money or savings. Most important, once you make the budget stick to it.
3. Limit Eating out
OK, I think this might get most people out there; I really struggled with eating out and still do sometimes. When I really started to pay attention I took a look at how many times I ate out the month before a started and I nearly lost my lunch. I figured out why we didn’t have any money, we were eating it. Not only will this help to save money but it will also be more nutritional. Cooking is becoming a lost art for the “average Joe”, but I really love it. I can control the ingredients and it’s cheaper by far. Be careful though, you can still spend a lot at the store so make a list and don’t go hungry.
4. Shopping is not a form of entertainment
We used to be so bad about going out and looking around at stores when we were bored. Honestly, this did nothing but make me want to buy stuff. I usually use the 24 hour rule when purchasing anything big. I wait 24 hours and come back, if I still want it and have the cash, I can buy it. A lot of the time I’ll look at something and never go back, out of sight out of mind. Find another means of entertaining yourself. Start exercising, go to the library or hang out with friends. There is so much more you can do that’s free or low cost and will be better for you.
5. Pay off Debt.
Most financial experts don’t like this notion, “you have to establish your credit” they say. Since when do we let someone else tell us how we are going to operate? I get really mad when this notion of a credit score is thrown around like it’s some indication of success. All the credit score says is that you like to borrow money often and continue to pay it back forever. There is not one indication in your fico score of how much money you actually have. If you don’t believe me check out myfico.com and see the break down of the FICO score. Practically speaking, the less debt you have, the more money you can keep. We often just can’t see past the propaganda fed to us by everyone.
6. Move Forward.
Most of the time people address out-go and how to spend less, but it’s important to think about income too. Think about where you want to be 5 years from now and start making a plan to succeed. Read a book, take a class and learn new things. The average millionaire reads 1 non fiction book a month. Maybe we
can take some tips from them. Do something different, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and expecting a different result. Get out there and take the necessary steps to move forward.
7. Be Positive
Henry Ford Said, “Whether you think you can or think you can’t; either way you’re right.” Be confident and positive about yourself, your money and life. While the media and others want you to believe that the world is coming to an end, you can ignore them and decide that you will succeed.

The American lifestyle is an unfocused mess.  We are constantly advertised to and distracted from our lives. How can we avoid falling into the trap of distractions and live successful lives? Author Al Ries says, “You don’t have to focus on everything to be successful, but you do have to focus on something.”  In our lives we are so distracted and preoccupied with so many things, we lose focus of our main goals.  One of the keys to successful living, is to set goals and to focus on acheiving them.  I have many times been so overwhelmed with Ideas or activites that I lost sight of my goal.  What things have you started and never completed because of distractions, or from over complication. It takes a lot of disipline to stop the madness and focus on one or two goals.  I challenge you to set a goal for this month, week or day and focus on one thing at a time.  Set long term goals and focus on short term actions with the end goal in mind. Here are some helpful hints for gaining focus in your life:

1. Set Goals, Write them down.
I know it sounds like it’s not that important, but there is a certain power that comes with writing the goals down.  People are more likely to acheive written goals.  It seems that unwritten goals are just a concept but when you write them down they become more concrete.

2. Simplify, simplify, simplify.
We all know someone or are ourselves people that have a hard time saying no.  We must learn to say no and not to take on every little request that is asked of us. So next time we feel the need to take on every little task we are expected to do, just politely decline and stay focused on your goals.

3. Avoid Paralysis of Analysis.
You have a great idea and you start to think about all the things that go with it.  After a while, you become overwhelmed with thought and do nothing.  There comes a time when thought is finished and it’s time to take action.

Remember these success principles when you have an idea or and goal you want to acheive, it may mean the difference between success and failure. You are your greatest asset so utilize all you have to offer and focus.

Is Exercise really mind over matter? Can you and I perform better or feel less discomfort while exercising by just occupying our mind? Today I was running to work and thought that I might have gotten a glimpse of what that might be like. I’ve been away for about a week and did not get to run at all while I was gone, so that made getting started again hard. While I ran, I started to get lost in thought about something and after a few minutes I remembered that I was running. I was amazed that I had forgotten about any discomfort and was running at a pretty strong pace for the middle of my run. If you mind holds you back in exercise then how many other areas are we held back in because we think about it to much or are unwilling to think differently. I’ve heard the stories of people overcoming things that were never thought to be possible. It’s weird that after one person breaks a record, it seems that others accept that they can to because it’s been done. Have you ever experienced something like this? Let me know I’d love to hear the stories. Get out and try this out, maybe you will find out that it’s all in your head.

When we say something like, “Gosh I’m such an idiot!” do we really mean that?  I’ve caught myself on several occasions saying something like that and afterward I stopped to ask myself if I really believe that.  I wonder if some part of us does think that or if we lack confidence and these comment are simply a subconscious by product of our insecurity.  I once heard from a wise individual that if you tell a lie or spread a rumor long enough and persistently enough, it will be accepted as fact.  I have to wonder if by saying these things, we not only lack confidence but we may also be dragging ourselves down further. Needless to say, I’ve decided that no good can come from this practice and have been trying to stop  making these comments. A challenge that I would extend to you is to allow yourself to make mistakes and learn from them, but don’t beat yourself up about them. Be careful about what you say and be positive, nothing good can come from putting yourself down, whether you mean it or not.  What do you think? Leave me a comment and let me know.