How much time do you invest in your health? It’s your most valuable asset, yet people often neglect it while pouring endless energy into building material wealth. Without health, though, money is useless. Since it’s Breast Cancer Awareness Month, it felt right to make investing in a healthy lifestyle the theme for this week’s Simple Living Sunday post. It’s a simple investment that can reap great rewards.
Remember, good health is wealth. For without it, you can’t enjoy anything in life.
Samuel Zulu
Three simple pleasures and highlights
Continuing my practice of celebrating the simple things in life, here are three simple pleasures and highlights of the last week.
- I got appointments for my husband and I to get bivalent booster shots this week. Unlike my previous boosters, I didn’t have any nasty side effects this time around.
- The sun returned at the end of the week after several days of dark, grey weather. Colleen and I took advantage of the sunny day to go for a lunchtime walk on Thursday.
- The beautiful orange shirt that I ordered from local Indigenous artist Western Sky Designs arrived just in time for Orange Shirt Day. I love it! Can you spot the three bears in the design?
This week’s simple living focus: Invest in your healthy lifestyle
Health is like a lot of other things in life. There are things you can control and things you can’t.
You can’t control your genetics. There’s nothing you can do to erase a family history of heart disease, or certain kinds of cancer. However, environmental factors—many of which are within our control—can lower our risk of many diseases.
Before going any further, let’s acknowledge that even people who do all the right things sometimes get sick. We can all cite examples of healthy athletes who die of heart attacks, and vegetarian marathon runners who get cancer at an early age. There’s still a lot we don’t know about what causes many diseases.
If we focus on these examples, it would be easy to just throw in the towel and say “why bother”! However, studies have shown that poor lifestyle increases the risk of adverse outcomes in groups with genetic risk factors. And, for the others, a healthy lifestyle can prevent a wide range of other diseases and ailments.
It’s really just common sense
Creating an overall healthy lifestyle for yourself doesn’t require a radical diet or significant life change. In fact, it can be attained through common sense decisions about the way we eat, move and live.
Harley Pasternak
You probably already know what you need to do to be healthy. In addition to limiting use of tobacco, drugs and alcohol, there are five main factors to a healthy lifestyle: nutrition, exercise, sleep, social connections, and managing stress.
So why is adopting a healthy lifestyle so difficult? Some of it takes time and energy. But, as a very wise person named Edward Stanley once said: if you don’t make the time for health, you’ll need to make time for sickness.
I’m often reminded of a talk I attended a couple of years ago. Dr. Greg Wells, author of The Ripple Effect said something that really stuck with me. Dr. Wells spoke of setting a goal to be 1% better. How much time is 1%? It’s just 15 minutes a day.
It really shouldn’t be that hard to dedicate 15 minutes a day to invest in your healthy lifestyle. Let’s start this week.
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Three things to do this week
How will you spend your 1% this week? Here are some things to do…
Choose one area to focus on
Rome wasn’t built in a day. If you try to do too much at once, you’ll probably get frustrated and give up. Choose one problem area to focus on first. Once you’re making progress in one area, you can move on to others.
Assess your starting point
Do an honest assessment of your starting point for your area of focus, and what your ideal end state would be. Then, consider what you can control and what you can’t.
Commit to 1%
Finally, decide what your 1% action will be for this week. Here are some ideas.
| If your goal is to… | Use your 15 minutes to |
| Exercise more | Go for a walk, or do an easy YouTube video workout. |
| Eat healthier | Plan your meals, or prepare healthy snacks |
| Get more sleep | Meditate or wind down before bed |
| Improve social connections | Call a friend you haven’t talked to in a while |
| Reduce stress | Journal, exercise, or practise mindfulness exercises |
If you’re concerned about time, schedule your daily 15 minutes in your calendar and treat it like any other appointment or commitment. If you don’t prioritize your health, no-one else will.
Sufficient sleep, exercise, healthy food, friendship, and peace of mind are necessities, not luxuries.
Mark Halperin
My plan for this week is to take time to plan meals and snacks ahead of time.
What will your 1% commitment be this week? Tell me your thoughts below.
I love everything health (which is a weird thing since I was such a bum and junkie for the first third of my life), and I try to stick to the trifecta of good sleep, diet, and exercise, in that order. Having those three things are often enough to handle most imbalances I have in life. Anyway, this must be the 1% post you were speaking about in your e-mail!
Thanks for dropping by Stuart. Yes, this is the 1% post I mentioned. The three things you mention are so important. I think social connection is a factor we often underestimate when it comes to health. That’s why the pandemic was so difficult for so many people.
As I get older I realize more and more how important health is… the utmost important because if we are not healthy ourselves, everything else is moot. But it’s been a challenge for me (and I know a lot of ppl) to be motivated… We encourage healthy living (eating, sleeping, drinking water, exercise, play etc) to our children because we know it’s best, but we fail to implement it for ourselves… I will try harder because I know ultimately I would be doing it for Charlotte too!
I think that’s common to many parents, especially mothers. But we really do have to look after our health, or we’ll be in no condition to look after anyone else.
Love those 15 minute suggestions for each focus area. I’ve been meaning to try journaling for a while so might give that a go!
That’s great. You’ll have to let me know how it goes.
Michelle, I love the goal of being 1% better! I see how people who put in the effort have rewards of good health pay off in huge ways! Thanks so much for this post filled with healthy inspiration!
Thanks Cher! Yes, the 1% goal is such a simple thing but it makes so much sense. Enjoy your Sunday!
It really does! Thank you, Michelle! And to you as well! Cher xoxoxo