My Journey to Better Health: Mucking through the Confusion

Everyone, it seems, has a beginning point or at least a tipping point. There needs to be some push, some wake up call that precipitates us into action. Anyway, that’s what happened with me.  Ten years ago, I met a wonderful beautiful woman, fell in love, and we had a son. All this at the age of forty! I had a daughter from a previous relationship I was raising and she had a son from a prior marriage. Talk about an instant family! Everything was wonderful and cool, but then I had the thought that I would be about sixty when my son graduated high school. That’s when I realized that I needed to take better care of myself.  I had played at it for years, but now it was time to get serious.  I spent a lot of my young adult life putting a lot of bad things, (drugs), into my body and felt that I had probably done irreversible damage to myself. (I had quit by this time but that’s another chapter in my crazy life.) I just felt that if I could take responsibility for what I was putting into my body, then maybe I could change my future.

After I made the decision to be more health conscious, I found myself wondering “what the hell do I do now!”  I mean it’s one thing to know that you need to eat differently and quite another to know what to actually eat. How do you even cook that stuff?  Where do you even find “that stuff”?  And then there’s the really big one-I don’t like any of that crap!  Even though I was convinced that real men needed “heavy fuel”(song by Dire Straits),  I dug in and started to do some research. That was even more confusing!  There were experts saying eat this way and experts saying don’t eat that way, eat this way! There just seemed to be so much conflicting information. (Unfortunately, not much has changed in ten years.)  I had to make some sort of beginning. So I began.

I decided that I would start by doing simple things that made sense.  I started drinking more water and cut back on coffee.  I started to eat more vegetables and substituted fruits for sweets.  I really started to think about my sugar intake. I’m hypoglycemic and as I got older the blood sugar episodes were getting more frequent and intense.  I knew I was riding a dangerous roller coaster but it was still fun.  I thought about quitting smoking and knew that drinking alcohol with blood sugar issues was so not good for me. I definitely had a good starting point and began to put all these things into a kind of haphazard, self-created program to get healthier. I had never heard of a health coach, but I really could’ve used one at this point. I also discovered yoga and incorporated this into my plan as well. I found yoga or yoga found me at a time when I needed it most. I had an accident in my mid-twenties and suffer from chronic back pain. I was tired of all the doctors, the chiropractors and all the pills.  If I was going to be healthier, then these things had to go. (But this is probably another chapter in my crazy life. Let’s just say that yoga has made a huge difference in the quality of my life and I am  now a certified yoga instructor.)  I just kept looking into things and and thought about what else I could try.

In my next post, I will continue my story and talk about some of the successes and learning experiences I went through.  There are no failures so long as you’ve learned something.  The journey to good health is just that-it’s a process not a destination.