A Lasting Approach to Health and Fitness
From a non-expert
I’ve always considered being physically active to be a crucial part of the lifestyle I want to live. The occasional morning runs, pushups or weekend football games were highlights of my second year in university. But I was never consistent enough for it to make a difference. It wasn’t until my late twenties that I decided to pay proper attention to health and fitness.
The turning point was in December of 2018 when I realised I was 10kg more than the ideal weight necessary to maintain a good body mass index.
About a year later, in December 2019, I checked my weight once again. This time, I had lost 12kg from the previous year. It felt great. And now, December 2020, I feel even better. Building some more muscle mass as I exercise 5 days a week with more than 10k runs for 3 of those days.
In the two years since I’ve changed my lifestyle to become healthier and fitter, I’ve learned some things during this journey that I’d love to share.
1. Love yourself at every stage of the journey
My self-love has remained constant all through my fitness journey. Whether I weighed 10kg more or less, it didn’t change what I thought of myself.
Self-loathing is not a good reason to start a healthy lifestyle. When you look at yourself in the mirror, who do you see? A failed project or someone full of potential? The result of your past lifestyle or the beginning of greatness?
When we focus on the negatives of our current state, we fail to see the potential for change lurking inside us. We fail to allow the champion to emerge and instead focus on the defeats and regrets. What this does to us is that it makes us postpone our happiness and confidence to a later date. It also ties our happiness to an external beauty standard and not what lies within us.
It means if it takes six months to achieve our fitness goal or the look we desire, then we’ll be miserable and full of self-hate for six months until we reach the goal. Such a negative feeling is never good for motivation while also damaging our mental health.
Before starting that diet or fitness program, remember to love your current self. After all, it’s your current self that decided to improve. You owe your future health to who you are now. You should be proud to look back at your old pictures and see the same incredible human being, regardless of what the weight scale reads.
Rule 1: Your self-love or happiness shouldn’t depend on how you look or what the latest beauty standards are.
2. How you feel is more important than how you look
Anyone who starts a fitness program because they want to look a certain way has missed the point. To be healthy is to be able to carry out daily activities with ease while reducing the risk of sickness and injury. Good health is really about feeling good and being energetic.
No matter how muscular and trim we are when we’re young, we all become wrinkled and saggy as we get older. But how we feel as we age is what makes the difference. A healthy heart, high bone density, low body fat and more are just some of the benefits of a healthy lifestyle. These also happen to be factors that help us age better, making it easier to fight common diseases that come with age.
Body goals should be the side effect of a healthy lifestyle and not the primary focus. Focusing on body goals can lead us to take unhealthy shortcuts to achieve them. You can lose weight in 2 weeks by starving yourself. You can also lose weight in 2 weeks by running every day. The healthier choice, and the one that has the better long term benefit, is obviously to run.
In the year that I lost 12kg, I weighed myself only about 3 or 4 times. I had no weight goal. I didn’t care about the six-pack abs. I only cared about feeling better. To be able to run the flight of stairs without losing my breath.
As a bonus, it is much easier to be motivated to workout if feeling good is the goal and not looking good. Because after working out for a month without seeing the bulges, the motivation starts to wane. We start thinking of what supplements (or steroids) we need to take to boost our progress.
Rule 2: The goal is to feel good. The beach body or six-pack abs is only the side effect.
3. There are no shortcuts to good health
You’ve probably heard of miracle diet programs, tummy flattening teas or ads that claim they can help you lose weight in 2 weeks. But one thing to remember is that the current unhealthy lifestyle took a long time to cultivate. And the side effects of that lifestyle shows up in the excess weight or the constant low energy. The only way to undo the process is to cultivate new habits. Eat healthier and move more.
I’ve heard people say they’ll use the miracle diets to achieve their weight goal and then they’ll work hard to maintain the weight. That almost doesn’t work. It now well understood that most people who lose weight in a short time regain it all in no time.
So instead of looking for a shortcut, consider the lifestyle choices that have led you to this point. Cut down on fast food, reduce sugar intake, eat more fruits and vegetables, and move more.
Anytime you postpone the hard work, whatever success you get is going to be short-lived. You have to be willing to put in the necessary work for the lasting results. The shortcut you take would almost certainly cause more harm than good.
Rule 3: Eat right and move more (i.e. burn more calories). Any other approach is deceit.
4. Staying motivated is hard, so start small
I’ve been exercising regularly for almost two years now and, I can say it doesn’t get any easier. It felt just as difficult to get up early for my morning runs this month as it was to get up for the run last year. And I’ll be lying if I say I haven’t missed workout days over and over again. I know I’ll miss many more to come. I won’t always be motivated.
But how do you build willpower and increase your motivation levels?
So far, I’ve found that starting small is an easy way to build momentum. A minute exercise is better than no exercise at all. Many of us get discouraged because most routines online are more than we can handle. The fitness instructors are extremely fit, making it seem so easy. Even if we power through the first day, we feel sore afterwards and stop the whole process.
To me, this is the wrong approach. The momentum you build is much better than completing any workout routine. If you want to start running, start with a 100m run. Yes, 100metres. If pushups are your thing, start at 5. Make it ridiculously easy to build momentum. Remember, a minute exercise is better than no exercise at all. Once you’re able to cultivate the habit of getting up daily to complete your little routine, then you can slowly increase the intensity.
I started my daily exercise with a 10-minute indoor routine in January 2019. I didn’t add to that until after three months, after building the habit of getting up daily. I only started running after months later, in September. And with my runs? I started with a slow-paced 25-minute run. You get the idea.
You’re starting something new. Something challenging and difficult. Many people have tried it in the past and failed. So why make it more difficult for yourself? Start slow, start small. You’ll be surprised what building momentum can do.
Rule 4: Build the habit, muscles will follow.
5. Diet is as important as physical exercise
A healthy lifestyle isn’t about physical exercise alone. A big part depends on what we eat. This statement captures the sentiment accurately: you can’t outrun a bad diet.
At first, eating right can seem tricky, especially if we eat out a lot. Consider the sugar in our morning coffee or tea to the carbonated drinks that accompany our lunch. And then the delicious fast food we order for dinner in which we’re not sure about all the ingredients. But improving our diet is much easier than we think.
The goal is to be conscious of everything we eat. So far, I’ve found that you don’t have to measure calories or follow strict meal plans to give your diet a big boost. We can be well on our way if we replace some unhealthy options with healthier ones. For instance, we can cut sugar, snack with fruits instead of chips or pastries, and choose proper meals instead of fast foods. And of course, eating more vegetables also goes a long way.
When it comes to what we consume, we need to give our bodies what it needs and not just sweet things.
Rule 5: “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food” — Hippocrates
In the two years since I’ve changed my lifestyle to improve my health and fitness, I’ve felt and seen incredible changes. And I’ve done it by taking simple steps without signing up for any gym membership or paying any nutritionist to teach me what to eat. The knowledge is out there and available for everyone. And getting started on your fitness journey is as easy as reducing your sugar intake or getting down on the floor to do five pushups.
I’m still not trying to achieve any summer body goals or six-pack abs. However, it is impossible to eat healthy with regular exercise without noticing some incredible physical transformations.
Health and fitness is a journey. It’s a lifestyle choice. In the long term, it is easier and cheaper than the consequences of not paying attention to our health. Stay healthy, eat right, move more. It is always worth it.
