Tuesday, September 30, 2008

I'm Wealthy, I'm Healthy

By Henry John

If you're healthy, then you are wealthy indeed. Health isn't something you can buy, but it's something you can influence, it's something you can nurture. But do we give our health much thought?

Youth has little or no time for anything as boring as health, yet our early years are very important when it comes to building a 'health platform' for our future. When you're young you don't give a second thought to health - that is until something goes wrong, but you believe that it never will.

What we eat when we are young is mostly up to other people. All we try and do is to avoid green vegetables and anything that is said to 'be good for us'. Things that are 'good for you' you believe taste awful. You far prefer candy and cola.

It all starts to matter when we become teenagers and we begin to take note of our looks and the way others look. We are all too aware of the comparisons that are made.

Eating the right food when we are children is vitally important. We don't normally have too much say in what we eat, but children do try and intimidate their parents into giving them things they want. Sometimes this can result in a very distorted diet - a bad diet.

Arriving in early adulthood overweight is not helpful. To have so many ingrained bad habits as far as eating and exercise is concerned makes doing something about it difficult - although not impossible.

The most important thing is to break bad habits and that requires developing an awareness of what they are. Many of the bad habits will have been endorsed by upbringing. To go against this can be a challenge. What has been accepted as a family culture in terms of diet and exercise takes real resolve and determination to change.

To make a real and lasting difference it's not diets that are needed, but a more fundamental change in behaviour. The only really successful way to do this is to learn new habits, slim habits, that will enable lasting change to take place.

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