Everyone seems to think that good health is a state of being, you’re either healthy or you’re not. You’re either ‘on it’, or ‘off it’.
To be considered healthy and looking after your well-being the perception is that you need to be in the gym everyday, knocking back protein shakes and eating nothing but rabbit food,
It’s such an extreme view. It’d be like viewing all CEO’s as these “Wolf of Wall St” type characters, going around shouting down their phones, dominating boardrooms and cracking open bottles of champagne,
When in truth it’s much more moderate.
It’s the same when it comes to your health. It doesn’t need to be an ‘all or nothing’ approach, you have enough on with work commitments, deadlines to meet, or sales targets to hit.
You’ve got a family at home that want to spend time with you as well and then you feel like you need to be spending hours in the gym, or getting out for a run, and turning down those weekend beers with your friends.
You then become more stressed and that shouldn’t be the case.
“Your daily diet and exercise should be there to support your health and help you deal with stress… not add to it.”
Imagine starting a business and expecting to be up and running like amazon straight away…it’s unrealistic.
Imagine your health is a small start up business where you’d set targets for the year and each quarter; sales, turnover, profits etc…
You’d then set out a business plan; what needs doing? when does it need doing by? There’s be a logical sequence to getting things done in order to achieve those targets.
You’d then do the same for growth in year 2, year 3 and so on until you’re on your way to a multi-million pound business.
Your health and the health of your staff should be exactly the same.
Rather than expecting to be doing everything at once, set yourself targets to achieve over the year.
Break them down into quarterly goals, then into daily and weekly actions that you can do consistently, around work that will help you to be more active, eat more nutrients and manage your stress levels… without costing you all the precious family time.
For example you could start with:
Aiming to walk 10,000 steps every day and eat 2 vegetables or more with lunch and dinner.
Then you could add in 2 gym sessions a week,
After that, drinking 2 litres of water every day and only drinking alcohol at the weekend
Keep building on top of these smaller actions and pretty soon you’ll be eating 7 or more veggies and fruit a day, drinking plenty of water, hitting 3 or more gym sessions a week and you’ll feel like you’ve got more energy, more focus at work, more productive and can still make the most of your time outside of work as well.
You already have that business mindset… now apply that to your diet and exercise.