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BeHealthyHappy Newsletter - August 2006
Issue One
Welcome to the very first issue of the BeHealthyHappy Newsletter! Each issue will have short articles and advice related to your health and happiness. It is my intention to present meaningful information in a way that is also practical and simple enough for people to incorporate into their lives. I hope that you will use and enjoy the articles. Feel free to contact me or check out my website if you have questions or comments, and please pass this newsletter on to anyone who you think might find it useful.
Healthy Change: Why is it so hard? (Part 1)
You know the story. Every January, you decide it’s time to change your life, and come up with a very ambitious list of resolutions. Unfortunately, most of them make it to sometime in March, before disappearing until next New Year’s. Or perhaps you see a special on health, or Type 2 diabetes, or obesity, and you are determined to change for about a day. Maybe it was the new Brad Pitt movie, and for a few inspirational hours, you decide that your abs should look like that.
Whatever the reason, most of us (the author included) have been truly inspired at some point to make a healthy change in our life. We really felt it and at the time, we really meant to do it. So what happened? Where did that inspiration disappear to? From my own life and from working with my clients, I believe that nearly everyone has good intentions when it comes to change. It’s just that most people don’t seem to know exactly what change means, or the best way to go about it.
Real, permanent change is not simply a reshuffling of your physical habits, nor is it the result of doing a few disconnected things differently. Lasting change involves a change in perception; it is actually seeing yourself and your world in a new way. Most unhealthy habits that people have are just part of the way that they learned to see themselves and their world, often unconsciously, a long time ago. Creating healthy change is a conscious, continual, and gradual process, and there are a few simple ideas that make this process easier.
The first and most important idea is that of Priority. It is not enough to have a vague notion that you want change something; it must be important to you. All people have priorities in their lives, even if they couldn’t tell you what they were. Our priorities are revealed by our actions. We spend time on the things that are important to us. You may disagree with this, but I challenge you to take a deeper look at your priorities if you’re spending a lot of time on things that you don’t believe are important. Sometimes you can uncover unconscious, unexamined beliefs in this way.
Since this article is about healthy change, I’ll use the example of “exercise” to illustrate my point about priority. I am convinced that the vast majority of people believe that exercise SHOULD be important to them, but most people’s actions reveal that it is not important enough to make real change in their lives. Never before in human history has there been so much information on exercise, and so much variety in terms of what’s available. At the same time, never before have there been so many sedentary people, or problems associated with a sedentary lifestyle. There appears to be a major disconnect between what most of our culture believes, and what most people actually do. I assert that this disconnect is largely the result of unexamined, unconscious priorities.
My point is: something must be important to you in order for there to be any real change. If you want to make healthy changes in your life, like regular exercise, a nutritious diet, less stress, more time with family, and so on, you have to make it a priority. Otherwise, the other steps for integrating change simply won’t work. Your efforts will be like trying to drive a car without an engine; it may look sporty and might be trimmed out nicely, but it’s not going anywhere.
(Please join me next time for Part 2 where I will discuss the other steps for creating healthy change.)