Since ditching the glorious sunshine and palm trees that made up my beloved home in Long Beach for row houses, humidity, and mean people, I’ve neglected my healthy lifestyle that once was! That has all but changed.
After my trip to New York (details to follow!) I returned to Baltimore with a lovely case of uticara (hives). It was so painful! I ended up taking off a few days of work and ingesting heavy steroids to cure it and I’m finally better.
It got me thinking.
Since moving here I have not become less health conscious but I have noticed that people in the Baltimore/DC area do not care about their health. If they do, they have odd ways of showing it. Everyone here looks at me like I have the plague when I say I use to be vegan. That’s in between their colds/flu/random bugs/shoving baked goods in their mouths.
Um, ew.
I’m not going to deprive myself of the good stuff but I’m not going to completely forget what California has taught me. You can be healthy and eat well! You can balance exercise with a busy schedule and you can be happy in the midst of dreary winter (okay, so the last one I learned in B’more, but still).
I brought a super salad for dinner today. I’m such a rock star.
Live.Love.&Evolve.
There are various studies floating around which go into great detail on how to form a habit. A habit is an acquired behavior pattern regularly followed until it has become almost involuntary. In order to form a habit one must first set a conditioning period. Scott Young suggests a period of 30 days. If it’s too short or long you’ll fail. On average he suggests that it takes around 60 days to turn something into a habit.
During the 30 day conditioning period the goal is fairly straight forward- turn the behavior into a habit. In order to do so he explains that you must do it every.single.day. You heard me right. The reason most people fail is because they don’t do it enough during the conditioning period thus the behavior never turns into a habit.
Take me for example. My current goal is to run, approximately three times a week. If I start out doing just that I will most likely never reach said goal. Starting today I am putting myself into a conditioning period for Young’s recommended 30 days, and as a result will run every day. Once exercising regularly (running in my case) becomes routine for me and I no longer need willpower to do so, I can reduce the number of days to my objective, 3 days a week. Until I am able to run everyday successfully, for about a month or more, I can’t drop the number of times I go running-or else I fall short of my goal. Get the idea?
Young seems to know what he’s talking about and because I have nothing to loose I’m stepping out on faith and will test his theory. In 30 days (hopefully) I will be a lean, mean, running machine. If not, I’ll try something else. In either case, I will work out regularly-one way or another.
Let the journey to greater health begin……now.
Live.Love.Evolve.
"The human body has no more need for cows’ milk than it does for dogs’ milk, horses’ milk, or giraffes’ milk”."
— Michael Klaper
"Think of the fierce energy concentrated in an acorn! You bury it in the ground, and it explodes into an oak! Bury a sheep, and nothing happens but decay."
— George Bernard Shaw
