Making Health Habits- How To

Habits for Health

Creating habits for health is probably the very best thing you can do in life!

Wow, that sounds extreme, but it is 100% true. “Once begun, half done,” as the old saying goes, is true of anything. And the truth is that, if you don’t eat right, it you don’t exercise, if you don’t sleep a solid 8 hours per night, and so on- you are not going to be healthy.

And, by not being healthy, you will be destined, over time, to be unhappy as well. That’s just how life works, grasshopper… Even if you are very successful, say, in your career, and make lots of money- if you are unhealthy, and don’t have a fulfilling family life and social life, along with a well balanced spiritual life- you lose! You lose the happiness prize!

The good news is that all of these pillars of a healthy, fit, happy life are all derived simply from developing good habits. And developing good habits is a pretty straightforward, and not really difficult endeavor. Step 1 is simply to figure out what good habits are essential for health:

1. Eat a healthy, paleo type of diet. Most people find this the hardest to do, so start here. Start with a big breakfast, so get up plenty early to make it, along with packing a good lunch. Do not have any grains with your breakfast, such as toast. Also, no juice, which is just sugar water. A green smoothie is ideal, but you can just start with eggs and bacon and/or sausage, and coffee. If you have no problems with dairy, load that coffee with cream! And remember- don’t limit yourself as to how many eggs or how much meat you can have- eat as much as you desire- it’ll keep you full.
Do this every day, for a solid week. Then, go for another week! Each night have meat with vegetables for supper, and sometimes have a sweet potato or white potato, loaded with sour cream and butter. Or perhaps some white rice with your pork chop. Just no grains at all, and don’t drink milk, especially not skimmed. Cottage cheese, full fatted, is also great for meals or snacks.
Now, do it for a third week. You should never let yourself be hungry, ever! Stay satiated, and happy with protein and especially lots of good fat. Never touch margarine or other industrial seed/vegetable oils- eat the real stuff!

Congratulations- that was the hardest part of the whole habit making and changing strategy. You now follow a paleo type of diet, and after 3 weeks you should feel and look good enough that you will never desire to give up this healthiest of all habit.

2. Keep up with your diet habit, but now add in the sleep habit- go to sleep each night early enough that you get a solid 8-9 hours of sleep per night. You could do this first, making it easy then to get up early and make your food for the day, but it is your choice. The food changes make the most obvious improvements, so I’ve started there, but it’s your choice. Keep this up for a couple of weeks, and you will be ready for the next step.

3. Exercise! This is also a tough one for folks to whom it is new, but it is as important as your nutrition and sleep. You may want to go to bed even a little earlier, just to make sure you have the time to exercise in the morning. I don’t want you to do a lot- in fact, it is key that you do not! I want you to start with 10 minutes of exercise, all done in your living room.
Turn on the TV, Netflix or Amazon Prime is ideal since they pick up playing right where you left off last viewing. As the show plays, I always start with virtual resistance exercise, which is where you flex each muscle group through its whole range of motion for reps. For instance, you can do the “high reach”, where you flex one arm at a time as high as you can reach, flexing through the whole range of motion for, say, 8 reps. Next, do flies, where you cross your arms as if doing dumbbell flies in front of your chest, flexing with internally generated resistance. Then, pulldowns as if chinning yourself, flexing all