Purify Your River

    First and foremost,thank you for taking the time to read my blog. I understand that in today’s society we all lead very busy lives with many hurdles preventing us from achieving what we set out to do, despite our best intentions. Improving our health being a prime example.

   I’ve kept this blog concise as I believe in quality over quantity. The purpose of this blog is to provide you with an overview of key principles to get you started on the road to better health. If you apply these principles, over time incorporating

them into your daily life, I assure you… slowly but surely you’ll most definitely improve your health.

    As a result of working as a Professional Personal Trainer for over thirty years , I have had the privilege of working alongside and learning from a number of leading Naturopaths, Nutritionists,Physiotherapists, Doctors and Fitness Trainers. I have also had the opportunity to work with an extremely diverse array of people from those seeking dramatic weight loss to weight gain; to those with chronic diseases such as cancer; to power lifters and elite athletes across a variety of sports.

 

                                             The devils in the detail

         Through all of these experiences, common health related themes have emerged. Threads if you like that tie everything together and result in better health. The health and fitness industry can be very confusing, littered with many claims and misconceptions making it difficult to know what really matters. But the reality is that maintaining good health is actually a simple process, not necessarily easy, but fairly simple. If you disagree with any of my principles, that’s great. In fact, I encourage skepticism. If you’re skeptical it means you’re more likely do your own research, check out the facts and perhaps even apply the principle in question to see if you notice a difference. But I don’t encourage pessimism. I haven’t seen many people improve their health who refuse to try something new before checking the facts. I encourage everyone to maintain an open mind and if you can do this, you have already taken the first step towards better health.

     Ultimately, your health comes down to your beliefs. Your beliefs determine what you perceive as “healthy” which in turn influences your health related choices and behavior. So with that in mind I want you to think of your health as if it were a river with many streams feeding it and each stream being considered either positive or negative. For example,drinking 2-3 litres of water a day would be considered a positive stream and let’s say, a bottle of wine a night over time would be considered a negative stream. Applying this idea more broadly, if you love your job and look forward to the day ahead, this would be considered a positive stream. However, staying in a job you hate and constantly feeling stressed is definitely a negative stream. City smog or country air? Fish fingers or fresh fish?

Get the picture?

      All of these streams influence your river of health. The more positive streams theclearer the river. The more negative, the murkier the water will become and rest assured that over time this will take it’s toll. The health statistics in Australia,America,Great Btitain and other westernized countries are scary and getting worse. One in three people being obese, with over 50% of people on some form of medication or prescription drug.

My message is simple and clear - Prevention is better than cure so start making

changes now to purify your river of health before it’s too late.

 

One last thing before i get into it. Health and wellbeing is a lifestyle. A choice of habits and small decisions made on a daily basis, collectively accumulating over time. There is no fast track or instant result. You may already be applying most of the principles I am going to share with you over the next few days, which is great. But if you’re not don’t worry, just start to bring them in slowly, one at a time. I recommend you start to incorporate a new principal every 3-4 weeks. This should be enough time to ingrain them so they become habitual. This means you don’t have to consciously think about them and can move on to tackle the next principle. If you try taking on to many at once it’s likely you’ll feel overwhelmed and put it all into the ‘too hard basket’ and stick to the habits you’re already playing out daily.  

Bottom Line: All behaviour expands. Good behaviour gets better,bad behaviour gets worse. Write down the top five negative habits you would like to change and the top five positive habits you would like to have that you don’t already have. Take one from the negative list and one from the positive list. Now take the next 3-4 weeks getting rid of the bad habit and adopting the good habit. Over the coming i will be giving you 10 principals to follow that will get you to a happy and healthy lifestyle.