You are killing it at work, but in the back of your mind you know something is off. You’ve been downing an extra coffee at lunch, your pants are fitting a little more snug than usual, and you were shocked that you look so much different in a photo from just a few years ago. It’s a tough pill to swallow, but you realize you are becoming unhealthy.
In my experience, professionals tend to put work first, and everything else second. However, if you are prioritizing work, eating unhealthy foods, drinking alcohol, and being sedentary, you shouldn’t be surprised that your health is slipping. The systems you have in place are perfectly designed to deliver the outcomes you are receiving. Making a change to your health and fitness can be overwhelming, as there are so many areas to place your attention. In my experience as a fitness coach, there are few actions that my most successful clients have taken that have created long lasting change:
Get tested: This is one of the most important and overlooked aspects of health interventions. The first thing I ask clients before I work with them is when they last saw their physician. At best I’ll get, “A few years back,” and at worst I’ll hear, “I can’t remember.” You have to understand the problem before you can start to implement change, and assessing your health objectively is a great place to start. Completing basic blood work (lipids, metabolic panel, and CBC), a physical (blood pressure, breathing, pulse ox, vision, hearing etc.), and weighing yourself are a few great, cheap, and simple assessments to start with. With this information, as you start to implement changes, you can objectively determine if the strategies you are taking are effective. The second benefit of completing an objective assessment is that you have a snapshot in time of your health when you weren’t ill. If, in the future, you do become ill or your health deteriorates, you have longitudinal data to assess for anomalies in your biomarkers. This could lead to better understanding of what may be wrong with your health.
Write down your perfect day when you’re 70: Maybe you want to ski three days a week, or you want to play basketball with your grandkids. Perhaps you’d like to travel Europe with your spouse. You are working your ass off now so that one day you can enjoy the fruits of your labor. But what if that day comes and your health is so diminished that you can’t enjoy the life you’ve worked so hard for? Just like financial investment, the investments in your health you make now will pay dividends in the last decades of your life. Once you have written down your perfect day, you can hone in on the areas that will need to improve now, so that over time, you are able to improve or maintain specific areas of your fitness that will allow you to take full advantage of your work in the last years of your life.
Write down everything you eat and drink for a day: Improvement in your health are centered around what you put in your body, and in my experience (both personally and professionally) people are completely unaware of the quality and quantity of foods they put in the body. Not only will writing down everything you eat and drink for a day (or week) give you insight into where you can make improvements, the act of tracking itself will cause improvements in your nutrition.
Now that you know what you need to do, get started! Take out a piece of paper and start answering these questions. Give your physician a call and schedule your blood work and physical. The best way to predict your future is to make it happen right now!
If you need help or guidance along the way, I’m here to help. Click the link below to book a free call today and I will help you decide the best course of action toward becoming happy, healthy, and productive!