Why does health and fitness always get put on the back burner? I can't tell you how many times I decided that I'd start exercising and eating right...only to never start. Every time I'd make the decision I'd always tell my wife "tomorrow I'm going to start eating healthy and exercising". Every time I'd find an excuse to not start the next day. Life is busy. Your priority list is always having things added to it. Believe me, I get it. How in the world does one find the time to exercise? Well the simple answer is this...they don't. If you wait to find time, you'll keep on waiting and waiting until you're so old that you're incapable of exercise and the only reason you have found time, is because you're physically incapable of doing anything else too. You'll never FIND time to exercise. You have to MAKE time to exercise. Stephen Covey explains it in great detail in the book "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People". He says that you have to split up your to do list into 4 quadrants. The 1st quadrant is for things that are urgent and important. Quadrant 2 is for things that are urgent but not important. Quadrant 3 is for things that are important but not urgent. Quadrant 4 is for things that are neither urgent or important. Most people pretty much live in quadrant 1 and 2...you know, doing the emergency things that have to be done right then. Then because they're so stressed out, they just want to escape and they go to quadrant 4 doing things that are neither urgent or important. What people don't realize though, is that quadrant 3 is where we should strive to stay as much as possible. If we are consistently doing the things that are important but not urgent, then most of the urgent things will never exist because we avoided it in the first place. Let me give you an example and how it relates to fitness. If you go eat a 2,000 calorie plate of food that is fried and empty of nutrition, you aren't going to instantly become obese. If you skip working out for a day, a week, even a month, you aren't instantly going to develop a ton of diseases and become obese. It doesn't work that way. However, eating healthy and exercising are both quadrant 3 activities. They're important but not urgent. So if you consistently eat horrible meals and don't exercise, you will develop health issues that become emergencies and put you in quadrant 1 where the stress is...which further develops into more health issues and is a downward spiral. If you consistently eat healthy and exercise regularly, you'll be avoiding a lot of that emergency activity and you'll have more time to enjoy life.
I think that whole point is crucial to understanding why health and fitness is procrastinated. It doesn't create immediate results one way or the other. It does however, create very life changing results. Obviously, there are a lot of conditions and diseases that we can get regardless of our habits and that is out of our control. I'm not suggesting that every disease is a result of bad habits. There are a lot of things though, that can be avoided, and that's what I'm referring to.
Another point that I believe is worth mentioning, is that people are afraid of commitment and failure. I know it took me 7 years to take my health back due to this. It probably has a lot to do with not getting immediate results as I already explained but because I knew it would take a lot of commitment, I avoided it. Plus, if I committed to it and then didn't do really well and saw myself as a failure, then I'd probably never try to start again. So I just kept on procrastinating...just wasting time. A fear of failure is a hinderance to life in general. I've learned that failure is actually a really good thing though. Failure is how we grow. Building muscle is done through reaching the point of muscle failure. Then the fibers tear and have to be rebuilt and they're rebuilt stronger than before. Why are we so afraid of failure? Every failure is another step towards success! Everybody wants success but every successful person got their success through failing over and over again until they were successful. It's just the way it works.
I always hear people say things like "life's too short to worry about eating healthy". I used to say the same thing and I believed it. The purpose of food is to give us energy and nutrients. In other words, the purpose of food is to live. Too many people live to eat instead of eat to live. I used to live to eat. Now I eat to live. I can live life so much more fully when I'm energized and feeling great! It's crazy to me that I ever lived otherwise by choice now that I've experienced life like this.
Health has become a top priority in my life because it affects literally every other aspect of life. It affects my social and family life by my ability level and energy level. It affects my spiritual life because I can think more clearly with proper nutrition. It affects my emotional well-being because of physiological changes that occur during exercise and proper diet. It affects my ability at work because I'm energized and motivated instead of tired and sluggish. There is no corner of my life that isn't made better because of the good health choices that I've made this year. I live by the 90/10 rule. 90% of my food is for health and nutrition. 10% can be whatever else I want. I usually use that 10% for chocolate chip cookies. Or sometimes a holiday becomes that 10%. This way, I can still enjoy the things that I used to live for and not feel like I'm depriving myself, and also get the benefits of eating healthy. It's a great feeling to take control of your health. I am 100% committed to helping those around me reach their goals if there is anything that I can do. I just want to spread the love!
