Sometimes when we think that we have made a mess of our lives we think that there’s nothing that we can do to fix it. There’s an old saying, ” You’ve made your bed, now lay in it.” It’s the cruelest advice. It’s absurd. If you’ve made your bed in an uncomfortable fashion, rip those covers off and start from scratch. You may even need to just throw those covers away and get brand new ones. You may need a brand new bed. You may need to move that bed into a brand new house. You may not need covers at all. Whatever you do, DON’T LAY IN IT! The choice is yours. Create a lifestyle of health and fitness and begin today.

If we have been overweight for a long time, fighting that battle year in and year out, it’s easy to say, “I’m just tired of the struggle, tired of dieting, to Hell with it all!” and let nature take it’s course. Oh, believe me, it will. Even if you have never had a weight problem in your life, sooner or later, most likely, you will. Some of the most extreme cases of middle-age weight gain that I have seen have been in people who never had a weight problem in their youth. Since they never dealt with monitoring their food intake or ever considered how much they exercised, as mid-life approached their waistline began to expand and they had no tools to fight back. What we often miss in this dilemma is that there is a fight, meaning that we have options. Obesity and poor health are not a normal part of aging. They are a normal part of negligence and abuse of the body. You can turn this around today if you so choose.

Notice the “D” word, dieting. DIET is the four letter “D” word in my world. Dieting is horrible. It is an forced state of deprivation that is usually intended to result in a fast weight loss. There’s so much wrong with this. Nothing right, but SO MUCH wrong. For starters, it’s forced. Nobody wants to be miserable and hungry so to begin a program where that is the norm is just absurd. It will always be forced. We rebel against force. It’s what we do as humans. We resist. Don’t DIET. Develop a healthy relationship with food by eliminating simple carbohydrates, especially added sugars, that are calorie laden and offer little to no nutrition. When you eat these foods, you are “wasting” your calories. You are also setting yourself up for extreme hunger because the simple carbs are quickly turned into sugar in your body and then you get an insulin dump and then your blood sugar drops and you’re hungry all over again. Ever notice how that 400 calorie piece of cake that covers a dessert plate at 10AM doesn’t keep you from starving before lunch? It caused you to dump a boatload of insulin and now you need more food to regulate that insulin dump. You would have been so much better off to have eaten an apple and a couple of string cheese sticks for half the calories, some protein and some fiber that would keep you satisfied until lunchtime. When you get ready for work today, or tomorrow, begin to implement this strategy. Take this matter into your hands today and change it.

You don’t have to be at the mercy of the “Food Fairies” that gift you with enough sugar and calories to take down a Brahma bull. If that trash food is bothering you at work, do what I do, throw it in the trash. I do one more call to see if anyone wants something and then it goes into the trash. I get tired of my work space being taken over by doughnuts. I have a high stress job that requires accuracy. I will not fight for space with food poisons. A well-meaning, lovely lady blessed us with several pizzas recently. They were right beside my computer for hours and the smell actually began to nauseate me. I alerted my staff that I was moving them to another location. I had graciously thanked the kind lady who donated them to us. She truly meant well, but then the ball was in my court to deal with them. You can protect your rights and your health without being offensive to others. You have the right to refuse food and to remove it from your environment. Do not be bullied by group-think. Your health matters. You are a person too. You have rights. I must add here, that is the first time in my life that the smell of pizza bothered me, but it did. If people are offended because you are protecting your health, that is their problem, not yours. You will be strong and healthy when they are broken down with old people issues. Today is the time to decide to stand up for yourself.

Oh yes, then there’s the issue of exercise! OMG, I have taken more verbal abuse over this one issue than anything else, and that’s saying a lot. I lived in an abusive situation for a long time before I changed my entire life for the sake of self-preservation. You need to realize that here at David’s Way, we live what we teach. We teach making your health your number one priority. That includes removing negativism from your life, or as David says, “Make your world small.” Remove negative input and superfluous people and events that don’t move you closer to your goals. Before I made radical changes that made my physical and mental health my number one priority, I was constantly ridiculed by more than one person concerning exercise. On the one hand, they would agree that I needed to exercise but then they would try to pick and choose how and when that happened. Let me tell you, as we age there is no wiggle room here. We have to make health and fitness our main focus or it either simply won’t get done or will be done with a half-hearted effort. I lift heavy and it’s barely enough to give me ongoing improvements in my health and appearance. I suppose that some would say that constant degradation in both health and appearance is inevitable and that may be true to a small degree, but believe me, almost all of the effects of aging on our appearance and our health is a result of our choices. In almost all cases, you don’t have to look bad or be sick all the time. There are terminal illnesses that can come to us all that affect everything, I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about that mindset that says, “Well, you know, I’m not as young as I used to be…” and using that as an excuse to neglect and abuse ourselves quite literally to death and look terrible doing it. When those days come, and they come to us all, then it’s time to double-up on self-care. You’d be surprised at how much control you can exert over aging with a whole lot of hard work. Again, begin today. The sooner you start, the better.

While I understand that heavy lifting is not for everybody, it’s my drug of choice. It has benefited me more than anything else in my life. David recently wrote that we need to choose an activity that we enjoy to insure that we will continue with it. That is so true. Strength training is very hard and demanding in all areas of my life. It is the focus of my life. It is the center of everything. I arrange my life around it as much as possible. This is necessary because of the demanding nature of this form of physical fitness. Unless you are ready to focus that intently on your exercise, it may not be for you. Find something that you can and will do. While I am, necessarily, a fanatic where this is concerned, you may want something that you can work into your daily schedule with ease. Lifting requires great attention to detail in all areas of my life. That, in itself, is one reason that I love it. You may like something that just fits in seamlessly with your daily activities. Whatever you do, discuss your options with your doctor and find a suitable form of exercise. Until you can discuss this with your doctor, begin studying various forms of exercise and how you could integrate them into your life. Would you need to go to classes? Would you join a gym or buy equipment for home? Maybe you could just find free videos on YouTube for your activity. Think about these things and when you see your doctor for his approval, you will have something to discuss. How much money can you spend to be fit? You don’t have to spend a cent to go for a brisk walk or work out along with a YouTube video. You can still buy cheap workout DVD’s and exercise bands for lighter strength training. Commit today to be healthier this time next year.

While we spend a great deal of time talking about what we CAN do today to begin to improve our health and appearance, this article would be incomplete without saying that if you smoke, drink alcohol in excess, do drugs to get high or spend too much unprotected time in the sun you are creating a nearly impossible environment to improve your health and/or your appearance. I must also reiterate, the same goes for sugar. It creates inflammation in your body and inflammation is credited with being the source of so many health problems. Glucose and sucrose are a part of the process of glycation in which sugar attaches to proteins and fats in our bodies. This process is associated with many diseases and aging. If you do one thing today to begin to improve your health, begin to get these habits under control.

And that is the crux of the matter, begin today. Today truly is the first day of the rest of your life. Your lifestyle will decide what that life will be like. While we live what we teach, we are always learning, practicing, researching and implementing everything that we teach because we know that the quality of our lives is mostly in our hands. We never tell you to do anything that we don’t do. We are our own lab rats. Our methodology is tested on us and it’s always free. Before making ANY dietary or exercise changes always consult your physician. We are Certified Nutritional and Wellness Consultants. We are also certifiable health freaks and live the life. We welcome comments, and contacts through our “Contact” function on the Menu. We will answer you. Be sure to check out the Calorie Counter Pro to determine your caloric needs. This information is free and totally private. Take advantage of all of the free articles and recipes and begin to build your new, healthy lifestyle TODAY.