Can relate to this? – you’ve got so many things on your plate that you’ve either let your health and fitness routine totally slide, or you keep telling yourself that you don’t have the time to incorporate a health and fitness routine.
A Stuffed Schedule
If your schedule is so jam packed that you hardly have time to breath it would be so very easy to tell yourself that you don’t have time to workout or shop for whole, healthy foods, much less cook for yourself. You could easily tell yourself that when you get time, when the kids grow up, when your job isn’t as busy, when you move, when when when, that then you’ll make the time to get healthy and fit.
There Is NO When, There is Only Now
The thing is, if you keep putting off your self-care for everything else in your schedule your body doesn’t care! It’s not going to wait until you have time, it’s not going to “hang in there” and maintain a high level of health just because you’re busy, in fact all of that “busyness” just might be causing you some stress and that for sure is going to effect your level of health.
The only time you have is now and if you are ready to live at an optimal level of life, your life will only get better when you improve your health. You don’t need me to tell you this, you already know how hard it is to get through the day with hardly any energy – when you don’t feel good you sure aren’t bursting at the seams with joy and boundless energy!
Over Extension = Emotional Eating
Furthermore if you’re an emotional eater your stuffed schedule can be contributing to a stuffed mouth and stomach. Emotional eaters get caught in that cycle of thinking that the food is going to solve their problems when in actuality it only creates more problems and believe me, I understand emotional eating!
The fact is though, that if you’re stuffing yourself with food because of stress and overwhelm in your daily life, you’re actually giving yourself another problem to deal with, which will in turn add more to your load of stress in your life. Stuffing yourself with food won’t help solve your other problems and it won’t give your body loads of energy, either.
So What To Do?
If you don’t see an end to your current hectic lifestyle (ex: if you have kids who are in lots of activities and you must drive them constantly), please remember that the better you take care of your own health the easier time you’ll have of keeping up with everything else. On the other hand, the processed junky foods and lack of exercise will contribute to bringing you down and even add to the stress in your life.
It will take a firm decision on your part to follow through with your daily health and self-care routine each day but believe me, you can do this. Even tonight I was telling myself that I really couldn’t get on the treadmill because I had too many other things to do, but I made myself do it. I took a pen and small pad of paper and wrote down all of my projects while I was walking on my treadmill. I gained a lot of clarity during my workout and my paced walking always reduces my stress.
You can do the same thing – you just have to make a decision to make yourself a priority in your life. Using food to stuff your daily frustrations and stresses isn’t going to help you even though at the time you might think it will. You just need to make a decision to commit to yourself and put yourself first because once you do so everything else in your life will be so much easier, besides the fact that the more of that healthy, loving action you give to yourself the more energy and love you will have available to give to others.
When I started back to work, I was full of good intentions to keep working out.
Unfortunately, my good intentions to “work out” didn’t work out.
Now that the contract is over and I’m back to being retired, I have no excuses…, except that today, we are getting the remnant of Gustav and our fitness center membership is on vacation hold as we were going to be hitting the road today. While we’re gone we will be doing a lot of walking and will be much more active than the last 6 months.
Hi Mike, it’s great to hear from you!
Well we can’t do anything about the past but you sure can do something about now. 😉 That’s sounds like an excellent plan to incorporate walking each day – I do at least 30 minutes non stop to get my heart rate into my target heart rate zone, a minimum of 5 days a week.
You can do it, all you need to do is make a commitment to yourself. 😉
I find that I always do better when I schedule workouts, just like any other important appointment. I also don’t apologize to anyone for making this commitment to myself, plus it helps to have a supportive spouse who holds me accountable! Regular exercise definitely helps quell my desire for emotional eating. And, if I leave all the “unhealthy stuff” at the store, that only leaves me healthy choices when I do get the munchies.
Yep, I can totally relate to that. I’ve overcommited myself a bit lately and the result has been a lot of stress eating and a lot of fast food dieting. Not good. Trying to focus but it’s tough.
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