Freelancers: Take a simple step to improve your health

October 26th, 2015

I have the typical story of a guy who grew up playing sports. I was always in good shape because I was playing baseball, football, wrestling, or racing motorcross. Then I stopped playing sports, got a job sitting all day, started really liking the taste of beer, got married, had a kid, and next thing I knew I weighed 240lbs. The number is shocking especially since I am pretty sure the last time I weighed myself I weighed 175lbs.

This isn’t one of those trick/hack/diet posts. Listen, for me I just got tired of just feeling like shit and having to take Zantac every night to avoid heartburn. I hit that realization in life where I understood I wasn’t invincible anymore. I couldn’t eat Taco Bell for breakfast, lunch, and dinner…and midnight snack. I have been able to start some healthy habits over the years, but always fall out of them. Usually this happened because I went from one extreme to the other. Resources from Simply Dental Chatswood inform that your oral health is as important as any other aspect of healthy way of life, like keeping a diet, for example. Also check what Dental Smiles Unlimited has to say about the ways you can keep your teeth healthy. I am a huge believer that diets don’t work, because it takes a true lifestyle change and a change in how you think about your health to have any sort of sustainable results. Avail the dental services from Garg DMD to give your teeth the best care.

Like a lot of you I work from home. My commute is only 100ft from my bed to my office. I sit on my ass all day. Needless to say I knew I needed to make a change.

Food

It is simple here. For me I started to make better choices. Instead of getting a decked out burger from Five Guys I would get a salad from Chik-Fil-A. Even if my will power wouldn’t work and I somehow made it into Five Guys I would just get a single patty with no french fries. Again, it’s simple here; make better choices and eat normal portion amounts instead of a whole box of CheezeIts in one episode of Dexter.

Water

Oh yea, cut out as much of the soda and sugar drinks that you can and really up your intake of water. I contribute my general better feeling and consistent weight loss to averaging around 100 ounces of water a day. There literally is an app for everything so grab one to track your water intake so you at least know how much or how little you drink.

Exercise

You are still reading? Awesome! Listen, exercise is hard for a million different reasons. We all can’t make it to the gym, or buy equipment for home. In my mind I built up exercise to be this big time consuming thing because of how I use to exercise when I was in shape. Here is the thing though, it’s honesty time. Something is 100% better than nothing. We all know how horrible sitting as much as we do is.

20/20/20

Ok so here’s the deal. Don’t commit to some crazy ass bootcamp that you will do once, feel like you are dead, and then never do again. Baby steps remember. We are looking to improve our wellbeing not kill ourselves. You can’t go from 0 to 100mph all in the course of one day. To give you something you can take away form this post do this. It requires no equipment, no gym membership, and shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes (just click on one less link a day and boom you have more than enough time to spare for this).

• 20 pushups
• 20 crunches
• 20 squats

That’s it. It helps you build muscle, burn fat, and gets your heart rate up. I don’t want to lead you a stray though this is even going to be hard at first. No one is forcing you to do this stuff, but we all have to start somewhere. Start with what you can do and build from there. If you can literally do only 1 pushup, 1 crunch, and 1 squat that is completely fine. Because guess what – that is more than you did yesterday and improving your health is a gradual process that will take awhile to see benefits from.

Your turn

I can only imagine you read through this article because there is something inside of you that knows SOMETHING needs to give. Please please please just take baby steps. You are much more likely to stick with getting healthier if it isn’t some drastic change. And hey you are in the same spot as so many of us. Feel free to use the hashtag #202020 to let us know you are working hard!

In case it wasn’t super clear by no means am I a personal trainer, nutritionist, or doctor. These are things I have done and they have helped me. I hope they can do the same for you, but we are all different. Also just for reference, in doing these things I now weigh 212lbs as of the day I wrote this.