It has been quite a while since I have posted on my blog.  You may ask why, though if you are a blogger yourself, you know that there are many reasons why an extended absence may be needed.  Sometimes life gets in the way, sometimes you are out of ideas, some may get burnt out for a time, or you might just need to allow for “me” time.  Well mine was a little bit of all of these, but mostly I was taking time to decide how the best way to proceed would be, considering that it’s hard for us to currently travel and that’s mainly what I was wanting to focus on when starting this blog.

So I was taking time to think, time to reevaluate the blog as well as ways to connect with my readers.  I have also taken time to study, my desire to become a travel agent hasn’t gone away and also started learning Chinese.  I’ve also spent a lot of time working out, started taking Shaolin Kung Fu along with my kids, including my very resistant 15 year old and tried to get away from the computer more.  In doing so, I’ve learned what seems to be the most important things to being healthy.

I’m sure you have heard time and again that eating healthy and lots of exercise are important steps to staying healthy and yes that is true.  However, as I can attest, it isn’t always that easy.  It takes time, motivation and a desire to do so.  It’s not some magical formula that you suddenly change your eating habits and start exercising and suddenly you are this healthy, vibrant person.  Learning to be healthy is much more that just changing your eating habits.  It’s much more than just getting more exercise.  Being healthy is a complete lifestyle change.

Being healthy starts from inside you.  You have to want to do the work that it really takes to be healthy.  Looking for diets doesn’t make you healthy.  Weight loss surgery doesn’t make you healthy.  It may help you loose some weight, but does loosing weight alone really make you healthy?  It may help, but that doesn’t make you healthy by itself.  Does walking daily or working out make you healthy?  Again, it may help, but that alone doesn’t make you healthy.  The first step to truly being healthier is to have a desire to be healthier.  But once again, that’s just a first step.

Once you decide that you want to live healthier, you have to determine for yourself what healthy living really is.  It might be different for one person than it is for another.  You have to really sit down and ask yourself, “what does healthy mean to me.”  Once again, it’s not JUST loosing weight and it’s not JUST working out.  Those contribute to a healthier lifestyle, but they are not what healthy really is.

Once you have decided what being healthy is to you, your next step is to set some long term goals.  Long term goals are the goals that you want to eventually accomplish over and extended period of time. Where do you want to be 1 year from now, 5 years from now to reach your healthy.  Think long term when setting these.  As with most of my long term goals, I really don’t have a set date as to when these goals will happen, since being healthy is a lifetime of work, however, these are the goals that I am currently working toward and once I reach these goals or find that I’m changing the way I think about health, they can change or be adjusted as necessary.  Here are a few of my long term goals:

Get my weight down to 150 lbs.
Be able to exercise more without getting winded.
Be able to walk 5 miles without getting winded or being in pain.
Be able to defend myself and my family effectively.
Learn how to control my anger and frustrations.
Find ways to focus on being happy rather than feeling depressed constantly.
Focus on breathing techniques in order to control my thoughts and movements better.
Focus on being able to balance so that I’m not falling and injuring myself frequently.

These are only a handful of my healthy long term goals.  In time I will create a post that will list all of them.

Then once you have those long term goals down on paper, you can start looking at short term goals.  How are you going to reach those long term goals?  Short term goals can be set as a week or a few weeks up to a few months.   You don’t really want to go any longer than 3 or 4 months as these change frequently and you want to have these set to see progress over time.

So looking at the first goal in my list.  My long term goal is to get my weight down to 150 pounds.  When I first started my “health walk” as I call it, I was 220 pounds.  I set my first goal to get down to 200 lbs.  This was before I’d learned what I know now.  This goal never really had a time period to it and this goal was my hardest so far because that’s all I wrote for that goal (I’m currently at 170). I learned during the time of working towards and reaching the first short term goal that you need to make time frames for each short term goal and make sure they are easily attainable in that frame.

I also learned that setting such a huge loss as a early goal can cause major frustrations, and even though the first 10 to 15 pounds burn off easily if you make the right changes, if you have multiple things that you are working on, there is a point where weight loss sits at kind of a stand still.  I found out later that it’s because if you are working out as well as changing eating habits at the same time, your fat burns off but you are also building muscle at the same time, so even though you are loosing fat, which is a great thing, you aren’t loosing as much weight because the fat is being replaced by muscle.  So this goal ended up taking me about 6 months and I was so frustrated that I wanted to give up.  Since then I’ve learned to focus on loosing fat and gaining muscle more than loosing weight, though that’s really hard to measure, so I do still measure it by weight loss, but it’s not something that is as huge a focus at this point.  I’ve discovered over time that 10 pounds of weight loss over 2 to 3 months is about what I can expect for myself.  So once I’ve lost 10 pounds (and it does fluctuate from day to day, so I only weigh once a week, at the same time each day), then I adjust my goals for the next 2 to 3 months.  One person suggested measuring my waist as a way to measure fat loss, but that wasn’t a good way for me, so I don’t do it, but that might work for someone else who is looking at loosing weight.

One of the biggest successes to my loosing weight is to completely stop drinking pop, drink less juice or drinks with sugar, and focus on drinking plenty of water.  This was hard to begin with because I was craving pop and every time I turned around, there was temptations.  Seeing a bottle of pop in the store or a gas station meant wanting to buy it.  For the longest time I allowed myself to give into that temptation.  However, I found that more and more often, I wasn’t enjoying the pop, it was getting to where I felt like I was just drinking syrup it was so sweet.  I found that the longer I went without pop, the less I enjoyed drinking it and much preferred my water, coffee and tea.  So over time I discovered that though there were things that I really liked, as I started cutting unhealthy choices out of my diet and lifestyle, when I was tempted to go back to those choices, they weren’t as enjoyable as before.  This discovery really got me to thinking about healthier living again and I adjusted some of my short term goals to reflect this discovery.  So instead of cut sweets out of my diet, a new goal read go a month without eating sweets.  This allowed me to then add it back in if I felt like it later or didn’t see that it made a difference to how I was feeling after a period of time.  Then after adding it back into my diet, I did notice a difference that I might not have noticed when cutting it out which helps me realize that the changes really are working.

As you read my goals, you were probably thinking well what does defending yourself and your family and breathing techniques have to do with healthy living.  These were added as I continued to evaluate what healthy living meant to me and as I researched martial arts after my son started taking Shaolin Kung Fu two years ago.  Even though they weren’t originally thoughts that I had when I first started this journey, I quickly discovered how important the martial arts are to healthy living for me and my family.  And truthfully, I have come to believe that some form of martial arts would be a great step for anyone wanting to make healthy lifestyle changes, even if not immediately focused on self-defense, because the exercise you get from martial arts and the breathing that you learn if you find the right instructors can make as much of a difference in your life as any other changes you can make.  Truthfully, these two, self defense and breathing go hand in hand.  I can’t speak for other martial arts that I’ve not tried, but I can speak from my experiences with Shoalin Kung Fu, first working with Kyle, then learning for myself by taking classes as well.  I never realized how great it would be for me, physically and mentally, even just starting out.