Healthy Lifestyle, not just a Diet.

    Diets don’t work, it takes more than a goal to lose weight with an end date, you have to change ingrained habits that lead you down the path of midsection growth. Some habits may be very hard to change, others may come easier, but it is always a challenge to live a better lifestyle. Short-term solutions are just that, short-term, true health and wellness covers many facets.

     My wife and I have been on a lot of fad diets in our quest for the appearance of health, it was the shock and awe approach. This really didn’t work, most seem to lack nutrition your body needs and as soon as you reach the end date you get the weight back plus some. At the point where we said we had to do something different, I was almost 270lb on the verge of a 40-inch waist. My doctor was about ready to put me on cholesterol and blood pressure medicine because my body was so out of whack, we knew at this point something had to change.

    We then started taking supplements to boost our metabolism, help heal the years of destruction we caused to our guts, and balance the areas that were reported low by our doctors. Funny that after doing just this, bad foods for our health turned into bad food for our taste buds as well. If we take in something that has a lot of sugar and grease, it now makes us feel sick. This made it easy to change the food we consume, we cut down red meat, removed the highly processed foods from our house, and completely cut fast food out of the budget. After all this, we hungered for more improvements.

    Now that we are eating right, things weren’t happening fast enough so we took the plunge into exercise. Now just so you know, neither of us is afraid of working out, having to work out daily in the Army, but working out sucks, it’s kinda like, hard work, we just knew we had to do it. We didn’t want to go to a gym and spend all this money to get in shape, plus at the gym, you seem to lose motivation, so we decided to workout at home. We started with only body resistance training and aerobics,  then later we added bands and very small weights and it has been great. We motivate each other to keep ourselves on track for goals we want to reach. Having your partner there helps cause you can be bluntly honest about what you think are problems, then bounce ideas about how to correct them.

    Well, now that we are eating better, and working out, we still wanted to improve our healthy lifestyle, what better way than to work on stress. I think this may be one of the hardest things to combat, yet it is a necessity for health and correlates nicely with all the other steps above. We first started by reducing the stress we could easily control like sleep, budget, really anything that you have a lot of immediate control over. We then looked at outside stressors caused by uncertainties in the world like job insecurities, debt things that may take years to easy, and it has been a long journey but so worth it.

    We have been working on ourselves now 4 years from me writing this, the improvements across the board are wonderful. We have more energy, our relationship is stronger, and our dreams are getting bigger. We’re not saying now we are not the picture of health, we have things that have not changed in the name of health, and vices we still have that are hard to break. We like to think we are a work in progress and on this road to a better lifestyle, we have made some great progress, as we inspire to be better.