Taking responsibility for your health

Just a few hours ago, while cycling on my mountain bike, I listened, on my mp3 player, to Zig Ziglar, as he was talking on the subject of health, he said: “You don’t pay the price for good health; you reap the benefits of good health.” You pay the price of not looking after your health. It is not always easy to stay healthy; you have to discipline yourself to exercise regularly and eat healthy. If you don’t, you will pay the price. As Zig said earlier when I listened to him, for a long time in his life he chose to weigh well over two-hundred-and-fifty pounds. He chose to weigh that because, as he said, he has never eaten anything in his life by chance, and neither has you.

We also choose not to do any exercise and or not to eat any healthy food and we make the mistake of thinking that because we didn’t develop any illness overnight or because we didn’t pick up any significant weight by the next morning, it is fine. Unfortunately every choice that we make in our lives, is accumulative, and it is only after a long series of wrong choices as far as our health is concerned that we suddenly discover that we now struggle with health problems.

Unfortunately you cannot run away from your own body, it is the only house you will ever live in. If it stops working properly it might take years to rectify the problem, and you will have to bear with it until it is fixed. You have a responsibility to take care of your body not only for yourself but also for those who are dependent on you and you’re going to have to discipline yourself to do so. As Jim Rohn said: “All of has to suffer from one of two pains in life. You either suffer from the pain of discipline or you suffer from the pain of regret, the difference is, the pain of discipline is measured in ounces but the pain of regret is measured in tons.”

Following are four principles that will help you get back into shape and start living a healthy life:

1. Do physical exercise habitually

Someone once said we spend the first half of our lives acquiring certain habits, and then we spend the second half of our lives acting out the habits we acquired in the first half. Because of that it is difficult for people who didn’t develop a lifestyle of regular exercise when they were young to start doing it when they are older. Unfortunately you have to develop the discipline of regular exercise otherwise you are going to pay the price later on in your life. If I can refer to Zig Ziglar again, he always says that life is tough, but if you are hard on yourself life becomes infinitely easier. If you prefer not to be hard on yourself you are going to find life tougher the longer you journey onwards.

Discipline is the ability to do what you should do when you should do it, whether you feel like doing it or not. You have to start taking action on this a.s.a.p. And remember the law of diminishing intent which states that for every second that you take before taking action on the commitment you have just made, the chances increase that you will never do it. So take actio
TNT as Denis Waitley says: Today Not Tomorrow.

2. At least 75% of all your training must be low intensity

One of the biggest reasons why people start out with a training program very excited and then don’t persist for very long is because they find it to difficult. Years ago there was only one way of training: No pain no gain! People were told to train as hard as possible in order to get the quickest results. We now know enough about the working of the human body to know that it is not the truth at all. You don’t have to train as hard and fast as possible in order to get rid of those extra few kilos.

In fact your body works very similar to a car’s engine. If you get into your car and drive of as fast as you can to where ever you want to go you will get their much quicker, but, you will use much more fuel than when you drive at half the pace. The only difference is that your body doesn’t only have one energy system, it has a few, and it doesn’t only use one energy source it uses four.

The most important energy source in the human body is glycogen, which is produced from the carbohydrates that was eaten. Glycogen is stored in the blood. The easiest way for the body to create energy is to use glycogen.

There are basically two types of training, aerobic and anaerobic. Aerobic means “oxygen dependent”, it basically means that the body uses oxygen in the chemical process of burning up energy. For the body to be able to use oxygen as part of the process the body needs to have enough time. Every individual has an aerobic threshold, the moment that the person trains to hard it goes over the threshold and enters the anaerobic zone where oxygen is no longer used as part of the process. When this happens the limited supply of glycogen that is stored in the body is quickly depleted in a very similar way as that of a motor vehicle driving at high speed, leaving the person exhausted after training.

When a person trains very light (as in a fast walk or a slow jog or run), the body has enough time to take the bodies stored energy (fat) and use it as an energy source. It is then mixed together with glycogen and oxygen and only a small amount of glycogen is burned up. The person then has lots of glycogen left inside his/her body and doesn’t feel exhausted after the workout although a greater percentage of fat has been burned. The best way to ascertain that you are burning the biggest amount of fat and the least amount of glycogen is to make sure that you do not to go into oxygen debt. You must always be able to communicate with the person next to you. At least 75% of all your training should be low intensity aerobic exercise. That way it is not hard work at all and you will look forward to tomorrow’s session.

3. Avoid the three white poisons

The final principle for healthy living I learned from Brian Tracy. It simply says that in order to live a healthy life you should avoid the three white poisons: sugar, salt and flour. Try not to eat anything made of white flour. The fact that it is white is a sign that anything that is of nutritional value have been pressed and baked out. The same goes for white sugar and salt. If you avoid eating anything with one of these elements you can eat almost anything else, and you will be well on your way to living a healthy lifestyle.

4. Eat breakfast like king and eat dinner like a pauper

The final principle to remember is that you should eat as little as possible after six in the evening. Nothing that you eat before nine o’clock in the morning can make you fat, because you will burn it all up before the day is over, but as the day progress you must eat less and less. Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a beggar.