Image Credit: Joel Bedford
The picture on the right is a unique one.
It was made by combining several different pictures and then editing them in Photoshop. What I like the most about it is that it seems to convey the message of a ‘spark of creation’, made possible only from various sources of knowledge and inspiration.
Why I say this is because of this very simple fact which has been uttered so often: The best diet is the one that you will stick to. Similiarly, the best exercise program is one that you will follow through with.
What this means is that very obviously, no matter what other people say, if you strongly believe in something, you will follow through with it.
The other side of the coin, is that if you don’t feel strongly about something, then why should you do it?
And that’s what this whole thing about health and 8fitness is about.
You can know what you need to do, et cetera, et cetera, but there is an obvious division between knowing and doing.
The bottom line is: Everyone can bombard you with information and encourage you to do something, but only YOU can decide to do it for yourself
What is needed is a fundamental shift in your perspective.
As Steve Pavlina put in his article “Cultivating Burning Desire“, you need to have some strategies in order to follow through with this.
You should give the article a read, and at the least have a look at the 8 points he gives. But I think that there are 2 main reasons for anyone to follow through with action. One of them is a fundamental shift in your priorities, and the other is personal accountability for success and failure.
The Shift
Let’s keep it simple. If you really believed in something, there is no price you wouldn’t pay to get it.
When you’re obssessed over a singer, when you’re addicted to cigarettes, when you’re comitted to a church, what you fundamentally possess is the burning desire to fulfill your own need.
In this case, you need to establish an urgency to care about your health.
For some people this is realising that you may not see your grandchildren grow up because you’ve got diabetes. For some its the fact that they went through an injury and felt what it is like to be sidelined from physical activity. You need to search for that meaning in your life, and no one can do that for you.
Just to share, for me, it is literally what I wrote on my front page. I want to do be as active as I am now when I am 90 years old – to literally be able to do handstands like I can now. I tell myself that this is life and death for me, and I do it with passion.
Personal Accountability
My strategy was to make myself accountable to myself. But this took some time to cultivate, around 3 years.
Very honestly, some people may not be able to achieve that in that time period because of factors like work, stress, previous ingrained habits etc.
So the solution here is to make your actions accountable.
Just to raise 2 examples:
Steve Pavlina talked about this man who wanted to quit smoking. He knew self discipline was a large part of the equation, but also knew that temptation to break this addiction might loom too strong for one man to control. So what he did was to offer $10000 to anyone who caught him smoking. I guess you can predict the result.
At the same time, we can draw support from various sources. Such organisations like Alcoholics Anonymous (link is for Australia Site, but there are many around the world) encourage this sort of personal accountability, and increase the chance of quitting.
Another example I would like to share is an example from Seth Godin when he was talking about his book “Tribes”. He pointed out an example of this lady, who asked him to help her grab a bag of Atkins Potato Chips. She saw that it contained 5 grams of carbohydrates, and then apologised and said that her limit was 4 grams.
Here’s a lady who 4 months ago did not know anything about a carbohydrate, and then now cared about the difference that 1 gram who make to her diet.
I have to admit that that is plain obssessive. But the real point I want to make is the fact that she suddenly became comitted to the Atkins Diet like it was her religion. Why?
Perhaps it was because she got stellar results. Perhaps it was because she felt she now belonged to the Atkins community. Perhaps it was the ability to show off to her friends that she was super strict with her diet.
The fact is no one will know but her, and that’s the point I want to drive home.
However, the fact that she could attach those feelings to a name called ‘The Atkins Diet’ and leech off the positive feedback of both the community and her own results, the likelihood that she would succeed in following the diet just went up tenfold.
And so what I will end with is to say that you need to decide to do something like this for yourself. Your health is ultimately your own. But never ever believe that you have to fight it alone. There is always a community somewhere out there, there is always some entity that can hold you accountable and give you the support you need to achieve any goal.
Like Seth Godin said in Tribes, “My job is to make you decide to do it, and you will find the way.”
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