Releasing weight. Looking better. Feel better.
Preventing the devastating impact that diabetes, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, heart disease or many other lifestyle related diseases can have on your ability to live your life in an active, fun, and free manner.
Being able to do the things you love, wish you could do, or even those you felt you could never do.
We all want these things, perhaps some more than others. Some people don’t act at all to achieve them, stuck wishing it were so. Some act but in a very limited manner and repeat the experience of the on track then off track cycle perpetuating frustration and few results.
If you really want to release weight, look better, feel better, and prevent lifestyle illness so that you can have your ideal experience of life then you must take ACTION with each of the 4 Essential Elements of an Active Healthy Lifestyle.
Then, of course, if you want to Make It Stick for the rest of your life each of the 7 Principles of Thriving Health must be addressed as they impact you and your life.
There are the 4 Essential Elements of an Active Healthy Lifestyle and each can support or derail the results you both desire and deserve. Make sure you build each into the design of your Fresh Start towards a lifestyle of Thriving Health.
Here’s our take on each element.
1. Mindful & Nutritious Eating
2 of 3 people in North America are overweight or obese. We’re busier and busier so quick, cheap, easy, and often unhealthy food is dominating. Fast food drive throughs are lined up well into the night, every night! Our food choices are increasingly beige and white and we’re eating from plates the size of serving trays. The biggest problem is that this all seems normal now.
This element is so much more than simply what you eat.
It involves recognizing the unconscious habits you live by and shifting key ones so they can positively support you in your busy world while you awaken to your patterns of eating that are currently leading you to a train wreck with how you look and feel, as well as with your health.
It involves taking conscious baby steps to make healthful choices and eliminate poor ones integrating each into your life over time until they become new automatic habits and patterns of your new healthy lifestyle.
It involves taking a natural whole food approach to healthful choices as much as possible and complimenting it with wise decision making on everything else. No one plan out there can possibly account for the specifics of you and your life.
It involves accepting that the shift you make over time is forever and not for short term hopes that will not stick.
Finally, it involves embracing and enjoying all the food you love in your life, only in a manner that supports your Thriving Health goals, now and for the rest of your life.
2. Effective Exercise & Physical Activity
Half of all North American adults are not physically active enough in their day to day lives to have much impact on their concerns with being overweight or obese. It is not enough to impact the growing epidemic of lifestyle illnesses and it’s getting worse.
This element is about shifting towards living more actively, in a way that works in your busy world, so that you see and experience all of the wonderful results that open up in your Ideal Life.
It involves many possible ways to achieve the results you desire.
It involves a shift towards an experience that is FUN. The benefits of activity are easily seen as satisfying as each step, each progression leads to more and more of the freedom to be, do, and have all that you really want in your life.
It’s all about designing your life so that an active approach to living becomes your automatic unconscious normal response in day to day living.
It involves a slow and steady made easy approach that enables you to gradually build this element into your life so as not to overwhelm an already busy life.
It involves both exercise and physical activity because they can be somewhat different things.
3. Adequate Sleep, Rest, & Renewal
We live in a sleep deprived society. We’re working longer and longer. We don’t take much needed breaks during the day, hoping to get more done. Obligations to family and friends mount. Multi-tasking everything takes over. When we do finally go to sleep our minds are racing with the days events or mapping out tomorrow’s. The result is that we sleep less and the quality of our sleep is getting worse and worse.
This involves creating a healthy respect for sleep.
It involves designing your environment to support the rest you need.
It involves consciously creating the habits and patterns of your day and evening so they support your goals of rest and renewal.
It involves a shift in the understanding how effective rest and renewal will actually lead to greater results, greater success, and getting more done than powering through.
The results of our sleep deprivation can negatively impact our taking action in the other 3 elements of an active health lifestyle. It can increase the risk of several preventable lifestyle related illnesses. It can also have an influence on staying or becoming overweight or obese.
At the same time being overweight or obese, having poor nutritional habits, not being active, and living with stress will negatively impact sleep quality. Kind of a catch 22 situation that needs to stop.
4. Releasing Stress
Stress has become a word so overused that we have become desensitized to it. It has become an expected byproduct of our working world and it’s taking it toll.
Some stress is good. It’s how our body responds in certain situations. Too much, however, negatively impacts each of the other 3 elements. Too much increases risk of lifestyle related illnesses. It can paralyze us into inaction, even though we know what we ought to be doing regarding our health and our lifestyle.
This element first involves embracing change in the other three elements and realizing their positive impact on releasing stress.
It involves acceptance and accountability.
It involves properly framing expectation.
It involves understanding influence.
It involves a shift from a negative frame of reference as it pertains to life to a positive one.
A whole life approach is seeing how each of these lifestyle elements both influence and are influenced by every other aspect of your life (relationships, work, career, business, finances, etc.). It is about designing your lifestyle to gradually shift in a slow and steady made easy manner setting a solid foundation for your life. It is realizing that when you do so you can have it all.
Your experience of life will transform into you living your Ideal Life with Thriving Health for a long, long time.
Enjoy your journey!
Beginning with a degree in exercise science and kinesiology, Brent Haydey has evolved over thirty years as an entrepreneur; building four businesses, and as a health, executive, and life coach.