Your choices, actions, and what you don’t do shape your future abilities. They affect what you can do both physically and mentally as you get older. They also load the dice one way or the other for how quickly your future health will decline.
Is your current path leading to a middle and old age that is fun, strong and pain free or one of decline, frailty and fear?
Not sure?
Ok, then ask yourself these questions.
Nutrition:
Are you mainly eating a high protein, unprocessed, high fruit & veg diet?
Getting some healthy fats (nuts, olive oil avocado) in daily?
Supplementing with Omega 3, a multi-vit and extra Vitamin D and K?
Are you supplementing with extra fibre?
Movement:
Are you moving regularly at all?
Are you following a strength program?
Are you regularly stretching?
Are you doing any cardio?
When was the last time you sprinted?
Are you doing any joint stability work?
Are you improving at any or all of these?
Sleep:
Are you sleeping at least 7-8 hours a night?
Is that sleep good quality?
Are you waking up refreshed?
Stress:
Do you live in a high stress state most of the time?
Do you feel overwhelmed, is everything coming at you too fast? Does the pace of life have an effect on your emotional stability?
Social connection:
Do you have any close friends you see at least weekly other than your spouse?
Are your friendships reliant on an activity (pub, football club or similar?)
How many people could you call up at 3am and ask for help?
Purpose:
Does your life have purpose, direction and meaning?
Are you living your values?
Intellectual challenge:
Intellectual challenge:
Are you regularly doing something that challenges your mind? Learning a new language, or learning how to play a musical instrument for example.
Health:
Have you seen your GP for a check up & bloods tests?
Are you regularly checking your blood pressure?
When was the last time you had your hearing checkd? .
Had your eyesight tested?
Had your teeth checked?
Are you flossing every day?
If the answer to these questions is no, don’t panic. Also don’t bury your head in the sand and ignore the issues. Even smokers can undo most of the damage in a few years of non smoking, so there’s plenty of scope to turn it around.
If just asking yourself the questions causes stress. Take a breath.
What to do?
Identifying the problems is the first step. Use the list above as a guide.
2nd step is to prioritise them into two lists:
1. Easy wins.
2. high impact wins. Prioritise anything that is easy + high impact.
Here is an 8 step process for changing your life:
1. Start with limiting what you’re attempting to a single thing. Focus is vital. We win by concentrating our effort. Start with the easiest/ highest impact.
2. Break it down into small, easily manageable steps.
3. Work out which critical behaviours you need to take to achieve the first step.
4. Find what support you need. E.g. (nutritionalist, coach, personal trainer etc.) to master those critical behaviours. You’re looking for skill acquisition + support.
5. How are you going to reinforce or build in accountability for those new behaviours?
6. Establish a way to score the frequency & quality of the new behaviour. Put the score sheet somewhere you’ll see it. Total up your score each week.
7. Pick a point in the future, say two weeks. Where you review how you’re going, address any blockers, celebrate wins.
8. Only when the new critical behaviours are bedded in as automated habits do you add a new challenge into the mix.
If dialling in one significant change took a month of practice, score keeping etc. Imagine where you’ll be in a year. Think how much your life would change if you changed 12 aspects of your life. BTW, each one is compounding so the benefit increases with every change.