Time to knock it off!

Most of us have fallen off of the healthy-living wagon to some degree or another. I seem to be alternating between coasting and backsliding lately. I guess it is time to knock it off and get back on the wagon.

So here is a call to all of us. It's time to quit making excuses and start doing all the things that we know we should do. My suggestions for getting back on the wagon:

1- Plan ahead so that healthy meals are convenient, instead of using unhealthful convenience foods. This is probably the most effective thing we can do. Plan to succeed.

2- Get more exercise. Quit with all the lame excuses for why we aren't exercising and just DO IT! Do something- even if it is just doing a few sets of crunches and bicep curls every other day. Involve your kids, your spouse, your friend or use it as your quiet thinking time. There is plenty we can do without any equipment. And if we can find the time to watch TV or play a video game for 30 minutes every day, surely we can find 15 minutes to do six or nine sets of some kind of strength training.

3- Stop turning to food to solve our problems. Self-medicating with food just makes our problems worse. Instead, when we want to eat because of something besides hunger, let's figure out the something. We may not be able to solve that problem right away, but we can make a little progress each time in understanding the "something" and that's how we eventually solve the problem. Somehow we need to figure out what's eating us, instead of us eating something. Having problems and stresses and "issues" doesn't excuse or justify what we do to our bodies when we medicate with food. Calories are calories and junk is junk, no matter what we tell ourselves. How about if we just remind ourselves that we don't need to stuff our faces just because we are sad or stressed or lonely or bored.

4- When you fall off the wagon, don't sit on the side of the road in the dust and watch the wagon roll off over the horizon. Just because we slip up one day doesn't mean we have to keep doing it the next day and the day after that. We don't fail just because we haven't done what we should. We've only failed if we don't keep trying again and again each time we've slipped up.

5- We all know what we need to do. Now it's time to do it.

We have a friend who kept putting off the changes he needed to make for his health. Then just last year, after twenty years of putting it off, he decided not to wait any longer. He put together a nice blog post about it. We talked with him about it later and he said he just hopes other people don't wait twenty years to do what they need to do to be healthier.
Maybe some of his ideas will help or inspire you.