The scale is easily the number one tool in everyone’s household that is used to figure out how healthy you are. STOP! I’ve heard it all too often, “I looked better when I was 120 pounds” or “I just need to lose 20 pounds to be healthy again”. That number is just a number and a very small percentage of how healthy you really are. That number on the scale has created a major problem in the fitness industry. All commercialized products focus on how to drop that number and not how to help make you a healthier stronger human being. Here’s the perfect formula: eat nothing and do hours of walking everyday for a week. You will drop weight like crazy but you will not be healthy.
The number on the scale is not a good measure of how healthy you are or how good you look. The fitness industry and influencers have pushed how you can lose all this weight and make a “3-month transformation”, but that doesn’t mean you will be any healthier. By shifting your focus away from the scale, you can obtain all your ambitions of being healthier as well as lose some of the weight. By following and improving in these 5 steps you can without a doubt obtain everything and then some.
- Resistance training
- Yoga/Meditation
- Eat whole minimally processed foods
- Find what is sustainable for you
- Focus on performance
Step #1 Resistance training
Resistance training or weight training has been shown to have huge benefits on the body. Building strength is something that is essential to any workout routine. Building a stronger body has been proven time and time again to be more beneficial than cardio. Don’t get me wrong cardio is essential too because of its benefits on the cardiovascular system. However, one key aspect of people that only utilize cardio as their main form of exercise is a decrease in muscular strength. Implementing at least one strength workout a week can have some major benefits for your body. Your joints will become stronger and more stable, and many other tasks will be much easier to do.
Step #2 Yoga/Meditation
I go over a lot of different benefits of doing yoga in another article. If you’d like to dive deeper into that topic then go ahead and click this link. Yoga and the meditation aspect of yoga will help your body in more ways than one. Yoga itself will help to build strength, stability, and mobility. You will be able to move pain-free in bigger ranges of motion which will allow you to feel better and healthier. Your body’s alignment and your posture will improve a great deal which will also help to unlock more strength and mobility by just getting your bones and joints into the positions that they’re supposed to be in.
The meditation aspect helps with your heart rate and your stress levels. You must have felt it at some point in your life. When your stress starts getting too high then your body reacts accordingly. You can feel sick, lethargic, and it can affect your mood for everything else leading to more stress. I remember this feeling during a difficult physics test. During the test I suddenly felt sick, my nose started running, and I started to feel hot. As soon as the test was over and I was outside I suddenly felt so much better I couldn’t understand how my symptoms just vanished. Meditation can help lower your levels of stress which will increase your levels of happiness and gratitude. This is almost like a secret fix to feeling better and healthier without even working out.
Step #3 Eat whole minimally processed foods
Dieting isn’t as complicated as it might seem. You will see a plethora of different advertisements and commercialized products or diets that will speak specifically to you. The worst are the ones that advertise to a very specific portion of the population. “The best diet based on your genetic type” “The best diet if you are an endomorph” or “What you should eat if you’re a 53 year old female trying lose 3.75 pounds living in Las Vegas”. The last one might be a bit exaggerated but you get my point.
Eating to be healthy is simple. Eat whole minimally processed foods. What does this mean? The foods that you eat should resemble the way that it looked before you cooked it. Typically the healthiest meals that you will make are typically the most simple. However, the real moral to this story is to shop in the outside areas of the grocery store instead of the inside. Packaged foods will typically be more processed and contain ingredients that you can’t pronounce. They will also have more added sugars which can really help to pack on the pounds because your body will absorb it so easily. A banana or an apple in the morning will be much more beneficial compared to a Poptart.
Step #4 Find what is sustainable for you
As Mr. Miyagi would say, “The key is balance Danielsan”. Finding that balance in our life is what really allows us to be healthy for the long term. Exercising 7 days a week and eating chicken, rice, and broccoli every day is not sustainable. We only need to be conscious of our health most of the time. We are human beings, not robots, there is no way for us to do the same thing day in and day out without getting burned out. You need to enjoy yourself at family events, go get ice cream with your grandkids from time to time, and enjoy one of your favorite meals at your favorite restaurant. Chances are that these events will only occupy 20%-30% of your diet, but it will occupy 100% of your happiness. You do need to be conscious of your health but you also need to enjoy your life as well. Because if you aren’t enjoying the life then what are you trying to be healthy for?
Step#5 Focus on your performance
How do you feel? Do you feel more energized throughout the day? Do daily chores feel like they take less of a toll? Does the idea of getting up off the ground no longer stress you out? These are all questions that should be focus on your journey to becoming healthier. You can probably drop that 10 pounds pretty easily but it would likely change your answers to these questions. There are an infinite number of questions that you can ask yourself regarding your health and the key is to watch how you feel as you continue on your journey.
Maybe you didn’t lose the weight on the scale but your clothes feel looser. You needed assistance to stand up from a chair before, but now you can do perfect squats while holding a 20 pound weight. You feel more stable when you’re walking and don’t have to worry about falling. You started with being able to balance on one foot for only a few seconds at a time, but now you balance for a full minute on both sides. These are accomplishments that are worth achieving.
The Number on the Scale is NOT the Full Picture
By following this guide you will see major improvements in your health. DISCLAIMER: There is a good chance that your weight will not go down and it may even go up a little bit. However, after a year of following these general principles you will feel and move better than before. The number on the scale might not go down, but there is a good chance that your body fat percentage will drop which is more important. All other aspects of your health will likely improve which will allow you to navigate life with less trouble. My final point against the scale: when you see the number drop you feel great, but when that number goes up you feel like a failure. End the cycle. Focus on how amazing you feel and how much stronger you have become and STOP LOOKING AT THE SCALE!
