Hope for Health

If you've followed me on this blog or on some YouTube videos I did back at the beginning of the year, you know I've struggled with weight for some time.  More specifically, health on the whole.  I'm not super huge, but I also find comparing yourself to others to be quite futile.  What is more useful, is comparing yourself to you when you were healthy, assuming you have been healthy at one point in your past.

For me I've been healthy most of my life.  Then, I got lazy for some reason in regards to my health.  My diet has never been outstanding although it's gotten much better in my adult life as a married man than when I was single and didn't cook hardly at all.  In your 20's though you can rely on a crazy high metabolism to overcome a poor diet, in particular if you're active like I was.

A couple years ago I lost a bunch of weight in a short amount of time (about 20-25 pounds in 3-6 months) because we were having a kid and I decided I needed to be healthy for him again.  We went part time vegan is what I called it, vegan during the week and then ate meat a couple of times on the weekend.  Then we went part time vegetarian, so a little less strict.  Then we moved back to the states and that diet plan went out the window.

I can remember having abs for the first time in years and thinking of a trainer from my past telling me getting your abs to show was all diet.  He was right, I did no ab work but yet my abs were defined.  They definitely weren't strong but were defined all the same.

In the states though diet is much more difficult to keep up.  We did live in Spain after all, a country who practices mostly the Mediterranean diet (not everyone eats jamon as you might expect, at least not nearly as often as is portrayed in media.)  Now we live in America, home of the SAD diet - Standard American Diet.  We have become quite accustomed to this diet ourselves, and sadly it is about the worst diet for one's health that has ever been imagined.

I had all but given up until recently.  I tried one of those supplement programs back in March with a 30 day detox and just couldn't stick with it after 4 short days.  Now I've signed up for a nutrition challenge for 6 weeks.  It's similar, but without all the expensive supplements and with group accountability.  For me the bigger incentive is if you break the diet besides cheat day you have to do 50 burpees.  I don't believe I can even do 50 burpees physically so that's a great motivation to not break it except on cheat days.

I also went to my first ever CrossFit class on Friday and enjoyed it.  It's intense to be sure, but I like getting a good sweat in and feeling it the next day.  As someone wise once said, "If nothing changes, nothing will change."  Sounds stupid simple, but sometimes that's what I need most.  Something so stunningly simple that you can't find a way around the truth of it.