Unleash Your VitalityYour Guide To Natural Health, Personal Fitness & Lifestyle Freedom

Picture yourself sitting over your desk with a neat stack of papers in your hands. It’s evening time, you’ve just winded down, and now you’re taking some time to review your progress over the last week and month.

Your progress?

Incredible.

Something happens when we take the time to write down our progress and track our results. There’s an instantaneous psychological shift that drives us to make more powerful decisions. It’s almost like as soon as you commit it to paper, you’re keenly aware of the chance that someone else may see it at some point down the road – whether on purpose or by accident. So, naturally, you’d like it look good :)

When we track our progress in any area of life, our awareness of what it is that we’re doing changes – and, following that, our results. Just ask anyone who has studied in the area of Time Management. As soon as you track every activity of your day, you become aware of exactly what it is that you do everyday…as well as how much time you dwindled away on things that didn’t really matter to you.

It’s the same with our personal finances. People with spending problems get on track and start using a monthly budget and are SHOCKED to see what they’re actually spending money on each month. The same exact principle applies to your health. I’d like to focus on the two key areas that matter the most: nutrition and personal fitness.

The habit of breaking complex subjects down into simple, manageable ideas (or action steps) is what separates people who are stressed out about any area of their life from those who are controlling it through effective management. If you can just focus your energy and concentration on your nutrition (diet) and personal fitness, you’ll be getting incredible results in no time.

Let’s start with diet. The best POSSIBLE thing you could do for your health right now is to start a Daily Nutrition Log. This could be a one-sheet that you create in Microsoft Word to fill in the blanks every day, a notebook/journal to record all meals and snacks, or an automated, fill-in-the-blank nutrition tracker online (My personal favorite is DailyBurn so far, another option being FitDay).

Start TODAY by creating that one-sheet, an unused notebook/journal lying around the house, signing up online or just grabbing a blank piece of paper and going at it! What’s important is that you just start now. It doesn’t matter if you just had an awful meal and don’t want to write it down – in fact, that disappointment is what will drive you forward toward better and better choices as you make progress. The idea is to just ask yourself how you can be healthier than you were yesterday. One of the biggest mistakes people make is thinking that they have to adopt a totally new diet and be perfect right off the bat to really change. The truth? Aim to move yourself forward by 1% daily, and you’ll make so much progress in a month that you’ll leave anyone shooting for the “big change” in the dust. We’re creatures of habit. By slowing changing our daily habits, we change our results in a sustainable – and enjoyable – way.

I also want you to make some kind of workout tracking system. This could just mean bringing a blank sheet of paper to the gym (or your home) to log your workout and track your results. Get down what exercises you’re doing, the time, the sets, the reps, the rest periods…everything. It gives you a sense of achievement in writing down your results, and also gives you a benchmark to hit and rise above with your next workout. It’s the all-too-common mistake of working out with no clear plan or direction that leads to no clear results or progress. Put in the extra few minutes everyday (literally – all you have to do is jot down what you eat and how you workout) and your results will start to speak for themselves.

A final aspect that shouldn’t be overlooked is that of review. A weekly review is a terrific idea, followed by a birds-eye-view monthly review. This gives you a sense of progress and direction, as well as re-direction if you’re not getting the results you want. For example, you’re reviewing your Daily Nutrition Log and all of a sudden realize that you’re having cereal every night at 9:30 pm! A seemingly innocent habit, but when you realize that your insulin sensitivity anytime after dinner and into the night will turn new carbs into bodyfat, you suddenly see why you’re not getting the personal fitness results you want. Then you simply course-correct.

I hope you see the value of this clearly. Can you remember a time when you used to track something in a certain area of your life? Was it workouts or nutrition? Or something unrelated, like finances or time management? If you have, try to get in touch with that sense of satisfaction you got from following a plan…a system. This is the habit that keeps giving, and continually moves you upward in a spiral toward radiant health and happiness in your own life. In simple terms: it’s worth it.

Unleash Your Vitality,

– John Brackett

=> Leave a comment below and let me know what you think!

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