Today’s post is one I never really envisioned myself writing but I have come to understand, and appreciate that our physical health had a tremendous amount to do with the way we do just about everything.

I had lots of goals for 2013, and to be honest, some of them won’t be met.  The good thing is that in almost everyone of them that I will fall short in, I know why.  It may be due to being unrealistic to begin with, maybe it was lack of commitment on my part or maybe just the fact that some of my priorities have changed throughout the year.  But at least I can learn from these failures.

A few months ago, my mentor Kary gave a group teaching on having a solid core so you could show up with all your energy available to best serve your family, your clients or simply anyone that came across your path.  I really felt convicted by his words as I knew that my fitness goals were some that I was way behind on.

Most of you know I am always looking for the next “great” book to read and about the same time as I was trying to figure out how to reverse the downward trend in my efforts to improve my eating, exercise routine, and sleeping habits, a book comes out called EAT MOVE SLEEP by Tom Rath.  Now some of you may recognize Rath as the author of StrengthsFinder 2.0 and I found this title surprising given his previous efforts – that was until I found out the rest of the story.

As it turns out, Rath has been dealing with a very serious illness for more than 20 years and refusing to just accept his fate, he set out to find out how he could do for himself what his body would not.  For more than 2o years Rath has been studying how the food we eat, the exercise we do, and the sleep we get influence our body’s ability to function and take care of itself.

I am not really going to break down the book, but I would like to share what I have learned in each of these three areas.

EAT

If you would have asked me 3 months ago “how well do you eat?” I would have probably said that I don’t eat bad, but I don’t really eat good either.  I actually have stayed away from the really bad stuff (except ice cream and pizza of course) for the most part.  My big problem was that I skipped breakfast, snacked my way through lunch and ate a big dinner – because I was hungry – Hello! And then had a snack later at night to finish off the day.

Now I get it.  Get a good breakfast, snack on healthy “whole” foods and eat a normal dinner. If you are going to have a snack at night, choose something healthy like fruits or nuts.   I know everyone is different, but the elimination, for the most part, of all the sugars and carbs I used to eat and a better schedule has allowed me to lose 20 pounds in less than three months and I feel much better.

MOVE

My relative inactivity over the last 12 months has certainly had an impact on me.  Losing twenty pounds has helped but simply stated, I need to start moving more.  No extremes, but some consistency would be nice.  I have some colleagues holding me accountable to this so I intend on making solid, lasting improvements.

If you want to know all the things you didn’t know related to why it’s important to exercise, grab a copy of the book.  I learned a lot of new stuff and I thought I knew most of it already.

SLEEP

I find it interesting that Rath just happened to list these three things in the specific order of how well I am doing on them.  The bottom line is that you need 7-9 hours of sleep a night. That means my bottom line is at about a minus 3.  I have a much better understanding of sleep and what happens to your body when you don’t get enough of it.

So here is the bottom line that I believe will help anyone reading this.  It doesn’t matter how much you know about any subject.  What matters is how well you implement the needed changes in your life or business.  I am headed in the right direction and the reason is that I finally figured out that you can’t do it all at once.  You need to take it one step at a time and develop habits.  Get one thing out of the way and start the next.

A very important challenge today.  First, get a copy of Eat Move Sleep.  This book will provide some valuable information that can change your life.  Second, choose one of these areas – any one of them, and start doing something different.  Set yourself up for success and start today.

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Barry Smith   11/21/13   photo courtesy of eatmovesleep.org   © Building What Matters 2013