The Truth about Being Healthy
We’ve made being a healthy a unique concept, a novelty. Even elitist to some degree. Being healthy seems like an expensive, elusive affair. It’s really not. Being healthy is not about sound healing, eating expensive avocados or imported fruits/vegetables, attending farmers market, spending days at a detox retreat, eating loads of supplements.
Yes, everything adds up but start with the things that make the 80% first.
Stick to the basics. Follow these to the best you can and you can lead a healthy life.
Go to bed and wake up at the same time.
Drink more water.
Get at least 10mins of sunlight. Especially in the first half.
Eat at regular times till you’re almost full.
Eat whole foods, local foods and buy directly from the source if you can.
Ensure to have some source of protein in each meal.
Designate areas for activities and don’t blur the lines: sofa for TV, dining table for food and bed to sleep.
Move and use your body to complete tasks.
Walk as much as you can, carry your groceries, changing the tyre of the car.
We barely use our hands and bodies anymore.
I’ve been cleaning my house on my own since the last 4 months and the amount of effort it takes is insane.
Mix in a couple of days of resistance/weight training.
Control/limit activities that increase stress: social media, screen time, alcohol, smoking, caffeine.
Spend some time alone with your thoughts and meditate.
Keep repeating these basics for the rest of your life instead of complicating shit.
You don’t need to spend a lot of money/time doing the said things. It can all be incorporated in the current lifestyle with some routine, rules and discipline. We need to stop making health a very fleeting concept. Just make small changes over a period of time and you’ll be living a healthy life in no time.
“I ceaselessly chant the refrain," Montaigne said, "anything you can do another day can be done now."
"He who postpones the hours of living right," Horace wrote, "is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out before he crosses."
To paraphrase the Stoics: You could be good now. Instead you chose tomorrow.
To procrastinate is to be entitled. To be arrogant. It assumes there will be a later. It assumes you'll have the discipline to get to ti later (despite not having the discipline now).
The graveyard of lost potential, we might say, is filled with people who just needed to do something else first.
The time to do it is now.
The time to get started is now.
The thing to start with is the hard part, the part you want to do the least. Not begrudgingly, but promptly and enthusiastically, with a body that's been trained for hard work and a mind that's sharp and focused.
Fools are too weak, too scared, too ill-disciplined for this-which is a problem for them but an opportunity for you.
Because it's here that you'll win. They'll be delaying, you'll be pulling ahead.
But only if you start now.”
― Ryan Holiday, Discipline Is Destiny
