Health As Habit: Nutrition, Exercise, And Weight Loss

So now you have impetus, and it is enough to carry you over the next few hours or days. After a while, however, that initial burst of motivation tends to fade, and eventually you stop showing up at the gym, you go back to eating pie ala mode, or you drop out of the local community college because all the changes you have made are just too hard to keep going.

Therefore, my initial suggestion is that you try to break your lifestyle changes (i.e. new habits) into bite-size chunks, carefully chewing, swallowing, and digesting each one before beginning the next. I suggest you pick up a book on the subject of Kaizen.

NUTRITION

For example: Let's say you want to eat a diet which is more healthy than the diet you eat now.

NOTE: When I use the word "diet" in this article, I simply mean the things you eat. That's what a "diet" actually is. It is a list of things you eat. In the last few years, many people have forgotten that original meaning of the word, and, when they hear "diet" want to know, "Which diet?" We're just using it to refer to what you eat.

In the interest of improving your health, you have decided to make some changes to your diet. Which of these would seem to be the most effective plan? By effective, I mean the one you think you could stay with.


 * Go into your cupboard, pantry, and fridge and throw out all the food you have and then go to the grocery store and stock up on tofu, bean curds, and beverages made from green persimmons, or whatever.


 * Pick one thing that you know is not good for you and drop it from your diet or find a substitute for it. Let yourself get used to the change and then move on to something else.

You know, I love popcorn and ice cream. As I grew older and began to discover fat on my body in places where there hadn't even been places before, I made a momentous decision. I would have to cut out popcorn and ice cream. You know how long that lasted! In fact, literally within seconds, a part of me began to feel depressed, I felt like I was being punished for something I hadn't done, and then I began to come up with arguments that ice cream and popcorn weren't really the problem. There must be something I wasn't doing right, but it wasn't the popcorn and ice cream... Really!

Taking my own advice, I did two things:

1. I bought ice cream in the form of small ice cream sandwiches and cups of ice cream. Rather than denying myself ice cream completely, I allowed myself to have one of these servings (smaller than the bowl of ice cream I would normally have eaten) a day.

2. I also bought popcorn in single serving bags. Previously, I would have popped a regular size bag and eaten it all myself.

Not a perfect or final answer to the problem, of course, but a step towards a solution. ExerciseEating the right foods and from the right food groups is important in staying healthy.