Everybody talks about results and wants results; not many talk about the consistency to get there.
This is a private story and learning:
I used to care about my weight more than my health. I think many people do. Generally speaking, having a normal weight is healthier than being overweight. It depends, though, on what you eat and when you eat. In the past, I tried many diets, and the problem I discovered with a diet is that it only temporarily gets you to a desired weight. This is because your habits didn’t change on a fundamental basis. That’s the well-known yo-yo effect.
Three years ago, I made a very important decision. I decided that I wanted to live a long and healthy life. It sounds strange, don’t we all want that? I am not sure that’s true! What people say and what people do are two different things.
In my case, I was smoking, exercised sporadically, didn’t care much about what I ate and sometimes I ate too much of the bad stuff. I cared a lot about my weight but nothing else, like my resting heart rate and my cholesterol levels, among others. So, while I wanted to live a long and healthy life, how I lived didn’t match this aspiration. That’s why I made this decision and tried to live by it. It was a silent and internal one. I didn’t write it somewhere. I didn’t tell my life partner. I quit smoking, and I educated myself on a number of topics having to do with nutrition, exercise, and fasting. I tried quite a few apps and read articles and books. Over these three years, I learned to make consistent decisions vs. decisions geared to a result; in this case, the result was one metric, the weight number.
Today, while I still care about my weight, I care ten times more about how to get there and take a holistic approach to my health, starting from physical health and going even to my mental fitness.
What matters is consistency to get to the result, not the result itself. I have found that such an approach applies to other areas, such as relationships and professional goals. It sounds common sense, perhaps, but its real-life application isn’t.
