Why eat nutritious foods, and live a healthy lifestyle? Have you ever taken a minute to reflect on your motivation for living a healthy lifestyle?
As I see it, most everyone fits into one (or more) of these three categories:
1. Reach specific goals
2. Manage disease and do damage control
3. Prevention
Reaching specific goals.
These are the people that want to lose weight, tone up, run a 5k, compete in a competition, look their best for a reunion or some other special event… The list goes on. For these people- they will try the most extreme diets, but are they making lifestyle changes? They want to reach a specific goal but what happens after that? Hopefully they make new goals and keep striving for something. I had a client tell me that I always have something up my sleeve. Maybe he was right, as a dietitian and personal trainer you always want to see people improve and make health a way of life not just to meet one goal.
Managing disease and do damage control.
These are the people that have had a wake up call- either they were told by their doctor they are at high risk for one of many health issues or waited to late until they were diagnosed with a disease. The good thing about many diseases is that nutrition and a healthy lifestyle play a huge part in management and minimizing complications. For example- diabetes, heart disease, congestive heart failure, obesity, high cholesterol levels, kidney problems, GI issues, alcoholic cirrhosis, the list can go on and on. These people are motivated to make changes and realize they are what they eat. This is where lifestyle changes are extremely important.
Prevention
These are the people that realize early on- what you eat and how you live today affects you down the road. Have you or do you know someone who is suffering from something that is preventable? Knowing that just a few changes in behavior in the past would have made a world of difference. Not everyone’s story is exactly the same, but you know someone that has a preventable disease. Why wouldn’t you do everything you can today to make sure you live to see your kids have kids or grow old with the people you care about? What can you do???
GET INFORMED! Find out what you need to do to live a lifestyle that will significantly decrease your risk of preventable diseases.
