January 3, 2018

Is this simple habit missing from your health?

 Welcome to Part 4 of our Health Kickstart series. Watch or Read Part 1: Frame Your Day here, Part 2: Speed Up here, or Part 3: Slow Down here.

This series is designed for people who want to get healthy… but just can’t seem to get any traction. Sometimes getting started is the hardest part. So, the goal here is to give you a step by step plan to do just that. Each part of the series will give you a small and easy action to take each day. Before long, if you stick with it, the steps within this plan will make a big impact on your long-term health.

Watch Part 5 Now!

Or, read more below…

Health doesn’t happen in a vacuum. In my experience, in fact, it’s hard to get healthy alone. You need support. You need love and encouragement.

You need others.

You need a community.

So, in this phase of the plan, we’re going to CONNECT.

Choose one of the following and spend five meaningful minutes on it each day this week.

1. Tell Three People You Love Them Today

This seems simple, but it can be a powerful exercise.

Pro tip: Maybe make sure the people you tell are people that you actually know. Strangers’ responses may vary. 🙂

Happy people are social people. Reach out and give some love today.

2. Call a Friend or Family Member

Ring someone up and just express how much they mean to you.

If that feels like something that might be hard for you to do (calling out of the blue might seem a little daunting for some), then just be mindful about doing it the next time you talk to someone you know. Let them know you appreciate them. People love to be loved and appreciated. Building this habit can go a long way in creating a happy life.

3. Pay It Forward

This exercise can be as grand—or as small—as you’d like. The next time you’re going through a toll booth, for example, pay for the car behind you. Or, buy a coffee for the person behind you in line at Starbucks.

Or, just look for an opportunity to do a random act of kindness. The thing about looking for these opportunities is that I can guarantee you’ll find them. You just have to look.

The key here, no matter which one you choose, is to be intentional about it. Look for opportunities to better someone else’s life. Even if it’s just a smile for a stranger, sometimes something small can go a long way.

[Want to learn more about how to build a support system that will propel you through your health journey? Download our FREE guide right here, right now!]

Listen to Part 4 here:

The post Health KickStart Series #4: Connect appeared first on Wellness Training Institute.

October 10, 2017

The most important question you can ask for your health is a very simple one…

“Energy,” especially when it comes to the body, is one of those topics that get pretty hippy-dippy pretty quickly, depending on who’s explaining it to you.

But take a step back for a moment and think. What causes you to move throughout the day? How does your brain communicate things to the rest of your body? How do your muscles move?

The answer? Energy. Electrical energy, in fact.

Are you ready to lose weight… FOR GOOD? Register for our FREE Wellness Dinner Seminar and learn how here.

If you remember back to seventh-grade science, energy exists in two states. Potential energy is the energy that’s stored up. It’s not doing much of anything except sitting there. Kinetic energy, however, is the energy that is in motion. It’s the life force that powers everything from the miraculous microbes in your gut to the distant stars growing in strength and brightness by the moment.

THE MEANING OF LIFE

Philosophers have been at work for centuries attempting to figure out the meaning of life. And while that’s still an open question, I’m convinced that energy factors into it. Namely, we’re supposed to tap into our kinetic energy and, well, move.

If you take a look at the diabetes and obesity epidemics in our country, you see a lot of potential energy. A lot of stagnation, and very little growth and change (apart from our waistlines, which, c’mon, that doesn’t count.)

Growth is one of the six basic human needs (along with, according to Tony Robbins, Certainty, Variety, Significance, Love and Connection, and Contribution.)

And growth is just another example of kinetic energy.

We are designed to change. To grow. To become wiser, healthier, better.

We’re not designed just to sit back and let the world happen to us. That’s a recipe, quite literally, for disease. For death.

So, you have a choice. We all have a choice. We can continue to commit slow suicide by eating the junk we’ve always eaten, spend our time avoiding the problems that come standard with each human life, to exist in toxic relationships with those around us, and keep remaining in a state of potential energy.

It’s Newton’s first law of motion. Whatever state of motion (or lack thereof) you’re in will continue until something pushes it in a different direction.

And honestly, I see the consequences of remaining in this state of stagnation every single day. It doesn’t end well.

But, again, Newton gives us the key. Allow that other force to move you towards growth and change, and you’ll find health and happiness.

What’s Your “Why”?

And what’s that other force? What’s your “why” for getting healthy and staying that way?

For some, it’s knowing that your loved ones need you. For others it’s waking up one morning and deciding that enough is enough and it’s time to live. For some that “why” reveals itself when they catch a clear, terrifying vision of the future if they continue to stay the same.

Any of these reasons are perfectly valid for deciding to change your life and seize happiness.

Watch a video on choosing life each moment of every day below!

Or listen here…

The post Kinetic Energy and the Meaning of Life appeared first on Wellness Training Institute.

September 30, 2016

“For he who has health has hope; and he who has hope, has everything.”– Owen Arthur

The hardest part about getting healthy is, for a lot of people, knowing where to start.

And the hardest part of knowing where to start is the fact that every time you look into some health tip, you find a countering opinion. You have so much information at your finger tips— Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Youtube, Pintrest— but what is true? What will work? So, you start researching, hoping that you’ll find the right information to get you started.

But instead of finding a solution, all you find is information.

And there is A LOT of it. Much of which contradicts itself.

For example: Bananas are good. Also, they are bad.

Or: An apple a day keeps the doctor away… or does it?

Or: Grains are good. But they are also the opposite of good.

Or: Fats make you fat. And… they make you thin.

It’s enough to make your head explode.

And that’s just the beginning of the pain a solo journey down the path toward wellness is going to bring you.

Not to add to your confusion unnecessarily, but here are a number of other obstacles you are probably going to encounter in just trying to figure out where to even begin.

Want more great information about the foundations of a healthy life? Download the first installment of our NEW 7-part eBook series The 7 Habits of Highly Healthful People for FREE right now, right HERE!

Labels

Labels are hard to read. (And that’s not by mistake.) So, even if you’re attempting to begin eating better by choosing low-fat or reduced-sodium processed foods (don’t do this, btw), you’re still fighting an uphill battle with information.

For example, look at this label for cornmeal:

All of that seems pretty okay, right? You have corn, the word “whole grain” (which is supposed to be good, right?), a little plant oil, some salt, and then… what is this TBHQ business?

Well, the answer to that question is this: TBHQ (or Tertiary Butylhydroquinone) is a petroleum-based preservative. It’s there to lengthen the shelf life of the cornmeal. It also increases your risk of cancer. It’s also a neurotoxin. And, oh yeah, consuming more than five grams of it at one time may possibly kill you outright.

And that’s just one example. Figuring out what you’re actually eating when you choose processed foods—even the ones that claim they’re good for you!—is almost impossible without at least a doctorate in biochemical engineering.

Marketing

When was the last time you saw a commercial for a vegetable?

Probably never.

And there’s a very simple reason for that: Vegetables aren’t good business in the same way that soft drinks or breakfast cereal are. The reason why is because vegetables can’t sit on a shelf for months at a time in the market, don’t offer very good margins for the corporations themselves, and aren’t filled with addictive substances designed specifically to get you to buy more and more (and more) of them.

Advertisers know this. And so, they aren’t going to waste their time trying to get you to consume them.

Which is why it’s so hard to try to eat healthy. You are constantly bombarded with messaging telling you to eat things that will eventually kill you. And even if you know this, it’s still so hard to fight against that level of psychological warfare.

When you’re a single target, it’s hard to keep from getting shot up with arrows at every turn.

Everyone Else is Eating Junk

This is probably one of the most powerful adversaries you have when attempting to fly solo on your health journey. By nature, humans are communal when it comes to food. Sunday dinners with grandma. First dates out at an Italian bistro. Thanksgiving dinner.

We eat together.

So, when you drive past a McDonalds at noon on a Tuesday and the parking lot is filled beyond capacity, it’s easy to sort of make up your mind that yeah, McDonalds is terrible for you, but still… everyone else is doing it.

In working with our members at the Wellness Training Institute, this issue of community is far and away the biggest hurdle we have to tackle. So many of our members come into the program attempting to get healthy, but have little to no support back home with their friends and family. Misery loves company, and that applies to food as much as it does to anything else.

For all the reasons I gave above why getting healthy alone is such a hard—if not impossible—task, this one is probably the most revealing why.

I’ve had countless members come to me, right before they graduate, and say how they never would’ve accomplished their wellness goals if it hadn’t been for the community they found in our Healthful Evolutions program. They found the necessary support with the other members of the program—people with similar goals, encouraging and celebrating with each other—that they didn’t have back in their regular lives.

That’s really the moral of the story. You can’t go it alone. If you want to get healthy, you have to surround yourself with others who want the same thing—both for themselves and, just as importantly, for you.

So… where are you on your health journey? What are your goals? What are your struggles? Share them below in the comments!

The post Why You Can’t Get Healthy Alone appeared first on Wellness Training Institute.

August 4, 2016

One of the things that sort of drives me nuts when I see a Facebook ad about getting healthy is how narrow the perspective is.

For example:

Does losing six pounds per week necessarily make you healthy?

Probably not.

Or, at least, not in isolation.

WHAT HEALTH REALLY MEANS
We’ve gotten so far away from what health means in this country that ads like this can just pass us by in our daily feed scrolling that no real red flags come up.

Which is why, at the Wellness Training Institute, our approach to health is holistic. Health is an all encompassing thing.

Is it changing our diets so that we can lose weight and belly fat? Sure.

But it’s also learning how to breathe, how to move, how to get our thoughts in order, and how to just—well—be.

It’s about getting our bad habits shoved to the side and replaced with good ones.

Which is the main reason that when we begin working with someone—no matter where they are on their health journey, no matter how old they are, no matter what their end goals might be—we to start with a gratitude journal.

THE GRATITUDE JOURNAL
You’re probably thinking exactly what most of our members think at first.

A gratitude journal? Seriously?

Isn’t that for second graders? What possible good could writing down what’s going well in my life do when all I want is to get my weight under control, my heart disease reversed, or my diabetes managed?

So, I get it. But stay with me for a second.

Nothing exists in isolation. No matter how independent you might consider yourself, you still came from somewhere, you had two parents, you live somewhere now, you have to eat food and drink water and breathe air to live. You are not an island.

In the same way, neither is your health. You can’t break it down into parts and attempt to reverse, say, your autoimmune disease by only treating the physical parts of it. You can’t just replace the starter in your car if the whole wiring system has been chewed bare by that nest of mice living in your carburetor.

And that’s why we start with the gratitude journal. There’s something very powerful, and very effective, about getting your thoughts and emotions pointed in the right direction before starting in on any of the other repair work.

A big part of this—and I’ll ask that you please forgive my extended car metaphor here—is that true health happens when you get the maintenance schedule in order.

You don’t keep a car running for 500,000 miles by taking it into the shop whenever something breaks.

No, you keep it running for decades by being proactive and giving it regular tune-ups.

You fix the problems by not allowing the problems to happen in the first place.

I’m talking about habits.

And because the mind—your thoughts and emotions— control so much of what the rest of your body does (often automatically, without any thought at all), starting to get that system in order is really the first step in getting the rest of the system fixed.

There are three reasons for this:

1. BEGIN AT THE BEGINNING
Firstly, change is hard. So, it’s nice to start with something simple to get the ball rolling.

How we do the gratitude journal is this: Every morning you wake up, and the first thing you do is grab a pen and the pad of paper you keep on your bed stand. You then write down five things that you’re thankful for.

Five: That’s it.

They could be the big, obvious things: friends, family, pets, etc.

Or they could be small, but vital: The air you breathe, the warm patch of bed you’re currently sitting in thanks to the sunlight streaming in through the window, the fact that you’ve been blessed to have awoken to meet another day.

It’s easy (it really is, I promise). There’s no pressure. You can even repeat yourself. It doesn’t matter. Just get it down.

You do this every day.

And soon enough, it become a habit.

Which is the whole point. Health— and sickness, for that matter— are a matter of habits. Health is one set of habits. Sickness is another.

2. AMPHIBIAN CULINARY TIPS
Which leads to the second reason for starting with the gratitude journal: Big, hard changes happen when you make a lot of little, easy ones.

It’s in the way we’re built as humans: We don’t go through complete overhauls overnight. Change—for good, or for bad—happens incrementally.

It’s the whole “frog in the cooking pot” adage. If you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, it’s going to jump out as quickly as it can. If you put it in cold water, however, and gently let the heat rise, the frog becomes so accustomed to the gradual change in temperature that by the time it realizes it’s in trouble, it’s already being served up with whatever condiments make frog meat even slightly palatable.

(If such a thing even exists. Gross.)

So. We change slowly. That’s how we’re designed, even from the start. They don’t call them “baby steps” for nothing.

3. SETTING THE TONE FOR SUCCESS
So the gratitude journal is the first healthy habit we work to instill. It’s the first because it sets the tone for the rest.

Dave Ramsey is a pretty famous financial counselor. His systems are designed to help people pay down their debt, and his success rate is pretty impressive. Through his method, people have paid down hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. It’s impressive.

One of the first steps in his system is to pay down the smallest credit card balance you have. It seems kind of counterintuitive at first. Why wouldn’t you tackle the big stuff first, kill those dragons, and then move on the smaller stuff after that?

The reason is a question of positive momentum.

There’s something innate within us that needs smaller successes to build out upon. We’re way more likely to get past the third step if we take the first two one at time, rather than taking all three at once.

So, by doing the easy stuff first, getting focused on the journey ahead, and then gaining that first little bit of momentum early and often, we’re far more likely to push on towards realizing our bigger, harder health goals.

That’s why the gratitude journal is such an effective way to start any change you want to make in your life—especially when it comes to your health.

Which brings us to a pretty basic question: Why do you want to be healthy? Health for its own sake isn’t a terribly valuable thing. For example, say you’re healthy and active at the age of 110, but… all your friends and family have passed on and you live alone in a cave by sea. Your physical health, at that point, isn’t worth much.

So, it makes sense that a big part of overall health also has a ton to do with your outlook on life. You could call this your mental health.

That’s what the gratitude journal does, first and foremost. It gives you a positive perspective on your life. And, after just a few days, you’ll find that because you know you have to write down something positive the next morning, you’ll begin looking for happy things. Our perspective changes so much of how we live. A positive outlook—as cheesy as it sounds—serves as the first few bricks in the foundation of your health.

And that positive foundation is where healthy habits begin to accumulate. As they accumulate, you’ll be shocked to find how great your life can be!

I hope that you’ll take these ideas to heart. You’ll be surprised at how much this one activity, done diligently over the course of the next month or so, will begin to transform the rest of your life. And if you have any questions, or want to learn more, I encourage you to join us for a free dinner!

Want more great information about the foundations of a healthy life? Download the first installment of our NEW 7-part eBook series The 7 Habits of Highly Healthful People for FREE right now, right HERE!

The post Thank Your Regular Stars: Why You Need to Start a Gratitude Journal Today appeared first on Wellness Training Institute.

May 31, 2016

These days, as a culture we have a skewed view of how to be healthy. Just take a look at your Facebook feed, or your email inbox, or watch a few minutes of television. You’ll be inundated with information about the latest fad “diet” while simultaneously being buried in ads for food that is—at best— the nutritional equivalent of cardboard.

We’ve gotten away from what true health looks like. We’ve lost the ability to even understand how health actually works.

Here’s the truth: Being healthy is a habit. It’s something you do again and again.

And again.

Here are three simple steps you can take to build that habit—and revolutionize your life in ways you probably can’t even imagine at this moment.

We call it the ACT method: Awareness, Connection, & Transformation.

Put simply, here’s how it works: Awareness is just knowing WHAT you’re doing and Connecting with those facts and behaviors on an honest level. Soon you do it again and again, and then it becomes a habit, and you create a Transformation.

Got it?

Great. Let’s dig a little deeper.

AWARENESS

Just knowing what you’re doing makes a huge difference in adjusting your unhealthy behaviors. 

We live in a society that is addicted to distraction. Awareness is the opposite of avoidance. We all do it. It’s far easier to avoid thinking about the parts of ourselves that we don’t like than to confront them. It’s human nature. But it’s also one of the primary things that stands in the way of developing healthy habits.

But before you can make any changes, you have to be AWARE of what those things are. Meditation, breathing exercises, journaling, and goal setting are all fantastic methods for cultivating awareness.

Remember, we aren’t fixing anything yet. This first step is all about just identifying what’s going on with our thoughts.

Want more great information about the foundations of a healthy life? Download the first installment of our NEW 7-part eBook series The 7 Habits of Highly Healthful People for FREE right now, right HERE!

CONNECTION

Once you’ve identified what you are thinking, the next step is to understand where those thoughts come from. Every thought you have is like a plant. It grows out of the soil up into the air, but it has roots you can’t see. Your thoughts are the same. They don’t exist in isolation.

So, by examining the WHY behind your thoughts—both the negative and the positive ones—you are able to begin to see things for what they really are.

Ask yourself how a certain thought makes you feel. Then ask yourself “why does it make me feel that way?” Look around that thought and try to identify its connections. Is it something from your childhood? Does it remind you of a certain person? Are the roots of that thought based on something negative or positive?

By first identifying a thought or a habit, and then understanding its connections, you can begin to understand why you do certain things without even thinking about them.

TRANSFORMATION

You’re able then to begin to replace that bad habit with a better one. Step by slow step, repeating that good action will literally rewire your brain.

And after a while, that good action will become something you do without even thinking about it. Which is what we call a “habit.”

Transformation comes when you have that connection with the why and how of what you do and why you do it.

I hope after reading this that you now have a better understanding how bad habits are broken—and new ones are formed.

Here’s your challenge: Follow these steps.

Don’t give into the ignorance.

And learn to listen to your body.

As you practice awareness, as you get to know yourself, you’ll be amazed at who you are becoming!

The post ACT: How to Change Your Life in Three Simple Steps appeared first on Wellness Training Institute.