Shifting Gears

Shifting Gears

Over the course of time this blogspace has taken several turns and has probably lacked continuity in its line of thought.  Today really continues in that trend.  For the first time in quite a while I am going to focus on health and wellness.

We all are given a body, mind, and spirit as the basic carriers of our lives.  What we do with these makes all the difference.  With the mind and spirit, in particular, we are also given the freedom of choice.  This is a wonderful gift when we begin to understand it, and a very dangerous one when we take it for granted.

With choice comes responsibility, a big word that many in our current society seem to forget is a critical part of our vocabulary.  In a nutshell, we have a responsibility to seek out choices that are positive and protect our physical, mental, and emotional well-being.  That is a BIG responsibility, and when we have spouses and children that depend upon us, it becomes a grave responsibility.

So how do we responsibly utilize the freedom of choice we are given in this life?  That is a great question for each of us to consider.  My first line of thinking goes to Dr. Stephen Covey's huge bestseller "7 Habits of Highly Effective People" where Dr. Covey says, "to begin with the end in mind."  Already this becomes uncomfortable, because most of us don't want to look all the way the the end.  Our earthly, physical death is not a subject that is high on our list of favorite topics.  However, when we take this long view and visualize our end state it begins to clarify the paths we should take in all aspects of our lives

Granted that not everyone has the same physical or mental capacities, the vast majority can do this on some level.  As we know the two endpoints on our life's line, then we can begin to make some decisions.  First, is the endpoint currently envisioned, is it the one that I really want for myself?  If not, then I need to renew my vision to determine a more favorable destination.  Once we have this renewed vision then we can take the bull by the horns and mark out the path that will get us there.

This is where the thought process becomes critical, as this is a reverse engineering of our lives.  What are the guideposts along the path that will tell us we are on track or off?  For each of us these will differ, but we all have them.  

In my life there are three primary guideposts that I am looking for; spiritual growth, physical/mental/emotional health, and financial contentment.  As previously stated today's primary focus is on the guidepost of health.  In previous editions I have shared some aspects of my health, and several of you know me well and have a sense of my struggles.  By way of review I am a middle aged male who once was quite active as a younger man who over the course of time gained approximately 85 pounds from my high school graduation weight until my poor choices led me to the doctor's office in 2012, where over the course of just a few months I was diagnosed with severe sleep apnea, type 2 diabetes, an underactive thyroid, and high clolesterol.  Life change was in order!

I am thankful to God for putting many supportive people into my life to help me on this then new journey to take control of my health.  Through changes in lifestyle, food choices, medicines and the like I lost almost 40 pounds and have had good glycemic control for 4-1/2 years.  Today there seems to be slippage back into some of my old habits, and some accompanying indicators on un-wellness (if I may coin a new term).  Over the past 15 months or so I have seen my weight creep back upward as a trend, to an almost 10 pound gain.  I register this, pretty much daily, in the S Health app on my phone, and each day that I do and I am 210 pounds or higher it reads in RED the word OBESE.  That word obese, is a killer!  It kills the soul and it kills the body, and today it marks the beginning of a renewed effort on my part to steadily move back first to the overweight status, which is still not good, and then to find out what the next word is on their scale, as obviously I haven't seen it before.

The extra weight I, and many of you, are carrying makes life far more difficult.  Our joints hurt, our backs actsout, and many of our systems struggle leading to diseases such as diabetes, kidney disorders, cardiac and pulmonary issues and many more.  These conditions, chronic in nature, consume billions upon billions of dollars in our healthcare system, not to mention lost productivity in the workplace, difficulty in serving our churches and communities, and lack of energy or ability to perform critical family activities.  It has got to STOP!

I am asking you to join me and begin to fight back.  This week pick one aspect of your life where you can begin to positively impact your health.  You may want or need to do more, but the evidence I have seen leads me to believe there is a far greater success rate when we don't try to do too many things at once.  Start with this one thing, for me it is going to be physical activity.  I am going to get busy again.  My current goal in the S Health app is 90 minutes per day which I don't believe I have been meeting on a regular basis.  This is particularly disheartening when you consider that is all activity, not just the focused activity of exercise.  Today I am going to reset this goal to 100 (still pretty puny) which would be an 11% increase from the current goal, and my intent is to blow it out of the water.

Next week I will report back and give an update on my progress.  I know many of you will be supportive and some will provide encouraging words, for this I am thankful.  The greatest encouragement would be to hear from you, and to know that you too are joining me on this journey.  Think about it, make a decision, and get started.  Mental assent does not get results, it takes action.  Lets all get busy with the business of improving our lives.  The results of holding to a course of bad choices, inactivity, and apathy are tragic, and I see them everyday all around me, and I DO NOT want to end up in those conditions, nor do I want that for you either.

Make today GREAT!!!  Choose wisely, and move forward.