Life Lesson 04: Take Care of Yourself (Pt 1: Body)

To be the best version of yourself, both for you and those around you, you need to feel good about yourself.  Starting from any other position just doesn't make sense.  You may not be in peak health physically, mentally, or spiritually, but you have to be happy with your direction.  These, to me, are the three distinct components to well-being, and today we’re focusing on the first: your physical health.  A key component to this is having a proactive plan that best suits your goals and gets you to where you want to be.  There are a variety of factors that impact your physical health, but taking the proactive approach to heart, these all fall under my umbrella term of preventative maintenance.  When beginning to assess where you stand and what areas are there for improvement, analyze your habits with regards to diet, exercise, medical upkeep, and sleep.

I’m a believer in the old axiom: crap in, crap out.  If you don’t take care to prioritize your nutrition and be mindful of what, when, and how much you’re eating, the rest of the following will undoubtedly be more challenging.  Not only does the food we eat restore and fuel our bodies, but exhibiting the discipline to do so reaps rewards down the line, as we train our bodies that our minds are in control.  This is the key differentiator between man and animal, the ability to be in control of our basest desires.

And with that ability to control our desires, we are able to delay gratification, which could be a slogan for exercise: Exercise: endure pain today for the pleasure of tomorrow.  Of course, there’s the initial endorphin rush that comes with exercising, but a proper plan needs to be in place for what you are wanting to achieve.  I concentrate on strength training, cardiovascular training, and flexibility, all of equal importance.  And the driving force for me?  To be an active participant playing with my children as they grow.  I don’t want to be the dad with the bad back who can’t play more than fifteen minutes of basketball with his son or the dad whose knees make him shaky dancing at his daughter’s wedding.  Your motivations and desires may lead you to different exercises and approaches, say if you’re preparing for an Iron Man, hiking Machu Pichu, or coaching 8-year-old soccer players. 

In tandem with your exercise, upkeep is required in your body’s other systems as well.  Making sure you stay current with medical appointments, getting annual tests such as blood pressure, bloodwork and vision, can ensure that you have baselines established to help if anything serious comes up or if you begin to feel “off” despite sustained progress with your physicality.  This is especially important if you have any hereditary issues that need monitoring earlier.  And I can’t stress dental hygiene enough – one thing they don’t tell you when you turn 12 is that those teeth are the only set you’ll get (naturally) for the rest of your life and should be treated that way.  I found out the hard way that my lapse in dental visits in my 20s led to expensive dental work in my 30s.  After a lot of sore gums, a handful of fillings, and one replaced tooth later, I’ve learned my lesson the hard way.  Taking it a step further by going beyond regular dental visits, you can find benefits to other aspects of your health well-documented elsewhere with regards to maintaining a healthy, daily regimen of flossing and brushing.

Last, and most importantly, is sleep.  If you think about sleep too long, it’s a really weird state that our body enters, where our brain makes up things to occupy our mind while our body rejuvenates.  Having a consistent and beneficial (more than seven hours) sleep routine makes controlling your diet and exercise habits that much easier.  You won’t be reaching for the extra sugar rush in the afternoon or pushing off that morning workout.  There is simply no substitute for the energy gained from being well-rested, and the inverse is true as well – just ask the parent of any newborn.

If you can get these areas of your life properly balanced and in-tune with your goals for life, both near term and long term, you will feel better, freeing yourself of issues that plague most people.  Being able to physically do what you want to do, whether on vacation or in daily life, is a great feeling, and not being able be active can lead to a slippery slope leading to misery, depression, and self-defeat.  Granted, you could get hit by a bus and nothing matters, but at least you would feel good up to that point.  Now that we have the foundation of wellness covered, we’ll delve into mental fitness next time.