50+ Lifestyles

This ONE Question Will Improve Your Health TODAY

By Logan Anderson, BA, CPT, CIFT
Owner of All Strong Fitness LLC

When thinking about becoming the healthiest and fittest version of yourself, it can be incredibly easy to become overwhelmed by all of the decisions, leading you to quit before you even start. This paralysis often comes from the seemingly endless ways you can become healthier physically, mentally, and emotionally. Should you eat vegan? Should you workout every day? Or just three times a week? How much sleep do you really need? This can quickly turn into an hour long brainstorming session, that leads to very little action to be taken. Today, I wanted to give you a perspective on becoming a healthier person that will hopefully be intuitive and easy to follow.

I want to pose a question. What makes someone a healthy person? Are they simply born with good health that persists throughout their life, regardless of how they live? Although there is a very small amount of the population that could seemingly smoke cigarettes every day, and live to be 100, the health of most individuals is a mirror image of the habits and behaviors that they do on a daily basis. Taking a 30 minute walk every day. Eating vegetables with every meal. Prioritizing an hour more of sleep vs. an extra hour of television. All of these are healthy behaviors that for many, weren’t developed in a day, or even a week. They were behaviors done consistently, to the point where their subconscious mind took over. With attention to detail, you can program your body to run on autopilot and make healthier decisions. This is of course much easier said than done. But ultimately, it comes back to the question I posed at the beginning of the paragraph: What makes someone a healthy person?

When you are navigating through the next days, weeks, and months, have this question in your back pocket. In any circumstance you know may affect your physical, emotional, and mental health, ask “what would a healthy person do in this scenario?” At first, doing this will seem challenging, time consuming, and at times impossible. You are retraining your brain from potentially years of living in a body and mind of somebody that is “unhealthy” or “will never be healthy.” The good thing about this, is that there is no exact blueprint of what to do. I’m not telling you to exercise 3 times a week, or make sure you get 7 hours of sleep. I just want you to sit in the brain and body of what you THINK a healthy person would do. Many of us are well equipped to make decisions like this. Going out to eat? What would a healthy person do? Likely skip out on liquid calories or trim down portions of alcohol, limit the amount of bread and high calorie appetizers, and potentially splitting their large portion meal into two portions to have for lunch tomorrow. There is no right or wrong way to do it. You are letting your intuition about what you think the right decision is, based on the identity of what you believe a healthy person is. With time, you won’t be practicing being a healthy person. You will BE the healthy person.

Logan Anderson is the owner of All Strong Fitness LLC. For more information, please visit allstrongfitness.org.