Slowly, I am becoming a health and fitness enthusiast.  If you want to avoid hypertension, heart disease, high cholesterol, diabetes and all that I recommend making an effort to monitor your health more.  No one wants those problems, and in many cases they are avoidable.

I’ve been eating healthier and exercising regularly for the past two months or so.  Occasionally, I have had to halt the exercising because of getting sick and other personal reasons, but otherwise this is the most consistent I have ever been.  With that said…

…I’ve noticed quite a few things.  

• While I am trying to eat healthy foods, I am surrounded by people who constantly eat CRAP!  Processed, high fat foods with preservatives and God-knows-what in it.  And I am no angel because I break down and give into temptations sometimes, but not for every meal.  The diet of Americans is insanely unhealthy and a huge problem that needs to start being addressed.
• With that said, I know that it is difficult to find healthy foods to eat that are readily accessible, affordable, and satisfying.  Very difficult.  I made my journey to Metropolitan Market the other day and really liked it, but the prices were a bit ridiculous.  Screw the government for subsidizing the crap and making the price of vegetables skyrocket.
• I don’t feel that good after eating meat (I absolutely love meat–especially burgers and pulled pork but my body feels more fatigued/bloated after having it).  Thus, I am trying to limit my intake of meat.
• In order for me to eat right, I have to be on an exercise regime–laziness and lack of movement actually make me feel hungrier and especially crave bad foods!  I don’t know why, but I can’t do one or the other.  A healthy diet goes hand in hand with exercising.  This is definitely motivation for me to work out–I won’t have as big of an appetite and I won’t crave unhealthy foods as much.
• If I eat something especially unhealthy after a long period of eating healthy foods, my body will get mad at me.  Literally, I will have a headache or something.  That never used to happen when I would eat crap most of the time, but since my body has adjusted to a healthier/better lifestyle, it does this.  Some of you guys might find that annoying if it happened to you but for me it’s a good motivator to keep up my progress of being healthy–and my body is just warning me haha.
• Making the effort to change your lifestyle is hard work but it is worth it.  I can’t say much about any progress that I have actually seen with my body yet (yeah, my body isn’t exactly bikini ready) but I have just felt SO much better, and that my itself is worth it.  Come to think of it, some of my pants are looser.  Major physical progress takes a lot longer than you would like (especially for women).
• Lastly, don’t give up.  I know several people who would mess up on their diet for one or two days (SO MINISCULE on the grand scheme of things) and then they think they failed, and they satisfy that guilt with eating junk and just giving up.
• You are bound to make decisions you aren’t proud of for your diet, but you can’t let one day of bad eating ruin everything for the entire month.  And plus, if you don’t give in to that one cookie or that one piece of pie, you will probably relapse because you are being too drastic, and it’s as simple as that.  That’s comparable to an alcoholic who stops drinking cold-turkey; it’s probably not going to work and relapse is inevitable.

Not all of the things on this list seem original, and I feel like I have heard them 1,000 times before, but these are my honest experiences with health and fitness lately.  It’s starting to make sense in application as well as in theory.

Get on your running shoes and MOVE!  Be persistent.  Be ruthless.  Be rewarded.

Carpe Diem 🙂