Most people I’ve talked to agree that as you age, your diet is more important to your health than how much you exercise. The quote I hear most is “To maintain a healthy body it’s 80% diet and 20% exercise”. In my own personal experience, I agree with those numbers. In my own personal experience, diets have never worked for me. I have self-discipline, but my self-discipline is better with some activities than others. What works for me, is addition based vs. subtraction. I work better adding things to my systems, rather than abstaining from or reducing them.
I’m better at adding exercise, than I am reducing food.
I’m better at adding fruits and vegetables, than I am at reducing snacks.
I’m better at adding learning or achieving goals, than I am at reducing down time, and watching TV.
I’m better at daily activities, little consistent areas of improvement, than I am with big projects with lots of tasks.
I’m better at adding in order to lose. By adding more positive activities I leave less time for negative ones. By adding more positive activities on a consistent basis, I create better systems to ultimately reach the big project goals. I fix things that come up repeatedly that I know if I fix, I will gain more time. If I’m not working on the positive activities on a consistent basis, the things I need to change don’t irritate me enough to fix them.
For example, If my wife takes my car and I’m listening to something on my phone using a bluetooth device, my car will steal the device to the car’s bluetooth. It wouldn’t take much to fix this, but it hasn’t irritated me enough yet.
I lose by adding, I wonder if that makes me a “glass half full” kinda guy!
Be Good,
– Chris