Friday 25 November 2011

What Does It Take?

What it takes to live a healthy lifestyle:

1. Making the right food choices and sometimes saying "no" to something you want.

2. Giving up an hour or so of your day to commit to exercise.


What it takes to continue living an unhealthy lifestyle:

1. Living with health related illesses (if not now, then later), such as diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, asthma and more.

2. Feeling fatigued and having no energy most of the time.

3. Living with physical pain and breathlessness. Being overweight can cause conditions such as plantar fasciitis (chronically inflamed heels), lack of being able to breathe properly when doing simple things like climbing the stairs in your home, sleep apnea (stopping breathing for moments at a time during your sleep which can be potentially very dangerous), and worse.

4. Living with being teased about your weight, your looks or your lack of physical fitness.

5. Low self-esteem. Being overweight can often correspond with a low self-esteem.

6. Living with not being able to fit into your favorite style of clothes or not being able to shop in the regular-sized clothing stores.

7. Having embarrassing moments such as having to ask for seat belt extenders when on a plane or not fitting onto a roller coaster ride or being uncomfortable sitting in a chair that has arms because the arms squeeze into you.

8. Feeling self-conscious when eating in public. Although it is doubtful anyone is sitting in judgment, it is not always the way things play out in our minds.

The list could be longer, but I will stop here. I know which of the lists I prefer. Do you?

5 comments:

  1. This is such a good post, and you are so right, I know which one I would prefer but sometimes we just need reminding of the risks we are exposing ourselves to by not doing the first list.

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  2. Thanks, Sarah. sometimes I need to remind myself of what it was like before I started to follow the first list.

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  3. How did you know I have Planter Fasciitis? I feel like this post was written directly to me!

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  4. Andrea - I had the condition when I was 145 lbs heavier than I am now. I even had steroid injectios in my heels in an attempt to cure it, but it only helped temporarily. The doctor never told me that losing the weight would cure the condition but it went away when I'd only lost half of the weight that I eventually lost.

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  5. I know which list i want! this is such a creative way of making a pro's and con's list. i loved it. thanks. Its also so interesting to see how much more sense it makes just to go and exercise.

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