The diet and fitness industry is hardly at a loss for words. Browsing the interwebs (or is it the world wide net…) will bring up thousands of pages of information, tips, and endless ‘must do’ and ‘never do’ lists.
Within 5 minutes of searching you could easily come up with dozens of ‘rules‘ of fitness and ways to live a ‘healthy’ lifestyle.
Almost all of them revolve around some sort of dietary intervention like changing the timing of a meal, or the composition of that meal.
After that you’ll get extensive lists of good and bad foods, supplements you should be taking, specific ways to workout, and specific times of day to workout etc…
At no point is the practicality of these recommendations considered, the story you hear is preached like a gospel and you may start feeling lousy about yourself if you can’t follow every recommendation you’ve heard.
The stress and guilt you might start feeling for not following these ‘rules’ could easily erase any health benefits you’re getting from doing what you can.
This is hardly a way to approach health and fitness.
Every little bit counts, and whatever you can do and whatever fits with your current lifestyle is just fine.
If you’ve heard that ‘cardio’ in the morning is best, but you can only do it in the evening, that’s just fine. Don’t let some magazine or website steal the positive emotional boost you get from exercising by telling you that you’re doing it at the wrong time of day.
If you lift weights but you don’t have the money or time for a post workout protein shake then don’t worry about it, you’re still going to build muscle and strength no matter what the web-o-sphere of self proclaimed experts say.
The moral of today’s post is to be careful what you read and what you let get into your brain.
If you’re reading this blog you probably already do lots of healthy and positive things for your body on a daily basis, but if you read too much ‘info’ out there you might just end up forgetting what you’ve done that was good and stress about all the ‘rules’ of fitness you’re still not following.
Instead of following everyone else’s rules try making up a few things for yourself.
Try to do one exercise ‘thing’ per day for your fitness, and one ‘nutrition/food’ thing per day.
Make it up just for you and it’s gotta fit your life.
I’d like to hear what you’re planning on doing if you don’t mind putting it in the comments section.
John
