I know this sounds really odd, but stood in my kitchen this morning my Amazon Alexa thing flashed up a recipe for a ‘healthy banana bread’. Now I LOVE banana bread!! I could eat a whole one! But it got me thinking, we throw it his word healthy around all the time and we all think we know what it means. The problem is no one realises it’s meaning is completely different for everyone.
Let’s make this make sense. If we look at it logically there is no version of banana bread that’s actually ‘healthy’ compared to something we can all agree is actually healthy, a carrot. So why was this banana bread supposed healthy? Well, looking at the recipe all they really seemed to do was replace sugar with a natural sweetener. The thing still had no real nutritional value to it, no real source of vitamins, minerals, protein or healthy fats. However, with all that said by comparison to a full fat, full sugar one it was ‘healthier’.
This is what I’m getting to, we need to understand that healthy is not a thing or a place is a sliding scale, a continuum that we move along. So what is healthy for one person might not be for another, but MOST IMPORTANTLY this knowledge is what stops being healthy from becoming unattainable.
You see, when we think of healthy as never eating sugar, totally avoiding alcohol, working out every day, only drinking green tea and bottle water etc etc a lot of us give up before we even start, or shortly thereafter. The knowledge that making a slightly better decision than yesterday for your health and well being is ‘being healthy’.
Here’s a fun example that you’ll at first think is me being stupid, but I promise will make sense. If you told me to smoke 5 cigarettes every day, drink 3 beers, eat 1 bit of veg and 1 bit of fruit, of course that sounds like really unhealthy and terrible advice. Now… if you are someone currently smoking 20 cigarettes, drink 6 beers and never eating any fruit and veg, all of a sudden the previous example is a huge improvement and is healthy!
Hopefully you see what I mean? ‘Being healthy’ is the improvements you make compared to you from yesterday! That’s the only comparison you can make, you from yesterday and you today! You never compare yourself to some random person on Instagram who probably isn’t half as healthy as they make out, or your friend Sharon from down the road. You don’t know everything about them as much as sometimes we think we do, just compare your choices today to those you made yesterday, last week, month or year. If you used to smoke and now you don’t, guess what? That’s healthy even if you still rarely eat fruit and veg, and you bloody love a pizza every week!
Just remember this and you’ll realise it’s impossible to mess up something that starts again every morning when you wake up. Your diet and exercise isn’t something that’s a sum total of a number of weeks or months. It’s a daily thing that resets every day for your entire life.
Enjoy life, help yourself feel awesome and you’ll be amazed what you achieve this year.