How Can You Be Healthy if You Don’t Know What Health Is?
In life, we often want to make a transformation in one area of our lives, yet we aren’t clear the definition of what that looks like.
We default to what the general population would consider a good outcome.
Let me give you a few examples:
-The default for success is more money
-The default for health is to lose weight
-The default for happiness is ‘someday when I…’ (finish the statement)
Well, let me ask you a few questions when it comes to these dangerous default definitions.
What if making more money meant you had much less time with your family and to enjoy the activities you love doing?
What if happiness always eludes you because it is always based in some future thought, and when that future gets here, you are living for some other future and so on?
Lastly, what if you lost weight, but your energy hits tank bottom? Is that really what you want? If you just wanted to lose weight, couldn’t you just amputate a limb? (This may seem silly, but it shines a glaring light on your ‘want’ to lose weight).
This is where fleshing out your own definition becomes critical. Because you cannot arrive at a destination unless you know the exact location.
So, here’s a thought exercise for you that I have had my clients do for years. I call it YOUR RECIPE FOR HEALTH.
And with any recipe, we need a bullet pointed list of the ingredients.
I want you to write down 5 bullets of what supreme health would be for you. If you struggle with that, it is often helpful to write down the bullets of what feeling unhealthy is to you.
For example, when I first did this for myself, after 15 plus years of being in the game of fitness and multiple (7) bodybuilding shows, I wrote down: great energy, pain free, strength and power, a sharp brain, a clear mind, stamina and the ability to ‘play’.
This came in handy when I competed for the final time in 2014 when my brain wanted to go back to the default I had set to for years which was to be ‘ripped’. It never served me, in fact, even though back in the day I would get ripped, my energy suffered greatly and I developed OCD with my food intake. It was an impossible standard to live up to.
Somewhere along the way, I confused my body image with my self image, so unless I was lean and ripped, I didn’t think too highly of myself.
After competing in 2014, I sensed myself going back into the ‘dark hole’ of basing my self-worth on how I looked in the mirror. Fortunately, I had my recipe list. I looked at it over and over and it was glaringly obvious that nowhere in my recipe did I have ‘ripped’.
That little recipe list broke years of self-inflicted suffering.
The ironic and funny observation is that as I continued to focus on my fitness ingredients since that time, I developed the physique that I had always desired, WITHOUT FOCUSING ON IT!
Far too many people jump blindly into a fitness routine, only to get frustrated and burnt out.
Your mind is an incredibly powerful tool, it’s up to you to give it the direction and focus it craves.
Be Unconventional,
Kyle Newell aka Panda Man
www.thepandamanofficial.com
Follow me on all social platforms at ‘thepandamanofficial’
P.S. – If you ready for world class help, feel free to shoot me a text on my personal cell: 908-229-6666
