New life New times…

I can remember when my first son was born. Here I was in the room waiting for my wife to give birth, but it hadn’t occurred to me that when he was born my life would never be the same. At 9:05am Corbin was introduced to this world and my life, as I had known it, would never be the same ever again. I remember when the doctor handed him over to me for the first time and said, “Here is your new son, dad.” I freaked! I thought he was talking to my father. I had never been called a dad or father before and it was a term that took me a long time to get use to. I remember going home and wondering to myself, “now what do I do?” I told myself, “I am not ready for this.” But as quickly as day turns to night, so did my old life vanish in front of me and my new life begin.

Over the years I have lived by a saying, “Who I am, my kids will someday be.” A statement that scares me an awful lot. Why? Because that tells me that for my kids to have a fighting chance in this life, I have to straighten out and fly right on so many levels. Now I wasn’t a late night partier, nor was I a drinker or smoker so the transition was not that tough for me, but responsibility and accountability became my best friends and worst enemies.

Responsibility and accountability to who? Now not just to my wife but a little defenseless baby boy who is going to look to me for everything and follow in the footsteps I leave behind. He will mimic my every move and become a mini me and if I don’t like myself and my ways, I must change them so that he doesn’t pick up my bad habits. Wow, to me, that is heavy and almost impossible to follow thru with.

Most Americans today are obese and most Americans don’t like that fact. Every morning we get up and try not to look in the mirror and if we could shower in the dark, well, we would. Then we look at our children and get upset when we see them sneaking snacks and sitting around doing pretty much nothing. It scares us and we yell at them to get up and get moving. There are programs out there like” 60 minutes of exercise” that are supposed to help motivate our children to get up and move.  There are children diet plans and classes in school to teach our kids to eat “healthier”. All of this is BS. It is a waste of our money on so many levels.  Remember what I said a few paragraphs up? “Who we are, our kids will someday be.” Does anymore have to be said?

The programs out there should be designed for adults not their children. The adults are the lazy ones not the children. The adults are bringing in the fast food and junk foods into the house, not the children. The adults, the parents, are the blame for our kid’s obesity problem. Let’s call a spade a spade and get our heads out of the sand and change ourselves and not worry as much about little Johnny or Anna. They will follow suit, we need to set the example.

Let’s start now! New Life and New Times are here. Take advantage of it and change!

Quality over Substance

I always get upset when people question me about the statement I made which was, “Activity is more important than the food you are consuming, when you first start out.” When we understand what a calorie is, then it really doesn’t matter what we eat, but it does matter what we do afterwards.

The average American diet looks like this… Practically nothing for breakfast. Then for lunch, well let’s WORK thru lunch. We are just so busy; we need to get these projects done. Then somehow we get home later that evening and we are beyond hungry and in some cases we even have a headache. At this point we open our mouths and consume everything in sight, good bad or indifferent. Oh now let’s not kid ourselves, yes we do.

For my “healthy eating’ people, in some cases you are no different. The only thing you may do different is instead of a greasy hamburger, you may have a huge salad for dinner. But everything else is pretty much the same.

So what is wrong with this? One thing, food does not make you healthy. Food does not make you thinner. Food does not make you lower your cholesterol or reduce your high blood pressure. Food only is the fuel we need to support life, period. What makes us thinner, healthier, lower or cholesterol and blood pressure? Activity. Activity helps our body clean out the bad stuff in our systems. Activity helps clean out our arteries by pumping blood thru them.  Thru activity and good blood flow, we have a great potential to lower our cholesterol and blood pressure.  Food cannot do that.

Now once we have established a decent active routine and the process of getting to greater levels of fitness has now become an issue, then we can bring the quality of food to the table. Then and only then does food enter into the equation.

In my next blog I will talk about finding reason to get active.

First step in the fight…

Don’t kid yourself, this will be hard to accomplish. At first it may seem easy to do but wait, wait until something happens to you good or bad. We have a tendency to revert back to our old ways to either celebrate because something good happened or just give up because something bad happened. Yea I am talking about your health and finally getting it to a point where you feel real good about yourself. Getting your health to a point where medications are not an issue. Getting to a point where YOU take back YOUR life!

First things first… we must surround ourselves with people who care about our success. This is very hard to do, because everyone has an agenda and most live with the attitude, “what’s in it for me”. This person(s) has to have our best interest in mind at all times. They must be able to hold you accountable in a friendly loving way. They must be willing to sacrifice for the cause, whatever that cause may be, without reservation. They must be willing to come along side us when we are down and discouraged and lift you up. We need to feel comfortable around that person to be ourselves at all times and without reservation.

Sally has been a client for a number of years and I remember having this talk with her when she first joined with me. She blew me off and told me that her friends would support her. Well, a year later she told me that it was a struggle to maintain her losses. She was still drinking excess, eating more than she should and not getting the rest she actually needs. I mentioned to her our initial conversation and at first she became defensive but after thinking about it decided to begin the process of replacing her old friends with new more supportive friends. Now don’t read too much into this. She kept her old friends just did not hang out with them anymore. Her new health conscious friends came alongside her and cultivated her and now she has no problem creating and achieving goals.

This first step is the most important and about 80% of your battle. Once you have this piece in place, the workouts will be much easier to maintain and your goals much easier to achieve and keep.