Where do I start my wellness journey when I have made so many past attempts and now possess a repertoire of experience in giving up, failing, and remaining unwell in my current condition. The answer is always right here, today, where I am right now.
It doesn’t matter my condition since there are no prerequisites to starting a wellness journey. I guess mine actually started two weeks ago on my drive back home from Chicago after spending the weekend with my brother who was visiting the United States on a business trip.
At some point on that 7-hour drive home I started talking out loud to myself and gave myself a ‘pep-talk’ that also contained several rebukes. Part of that rebuke included me saying out loud “you are f***ing killing yourself living the way you are!”
And I was absolutely right. For the past couple of years I have felt unwell. I have felt frequently fatigued, Aches and Pains, and have flip-flopped between obesity and being overweight. I have felt stressed, anxious and depressed. What a rubbish way to live. I am only thirty-four and so I said to myself on that same drive “You’re too f***ing young to feel like this!”
So these past two weeks I have been starting a new wellness journey. Something definitely feels different this time. It certainly hasn’t been easy starting but in the past two weeks I have started to see some of the positive benefits of choosing to live well by stopping some of the things that were killing myself.
Living unwell sucks and I hate it. I guess something snapped on that drive home that made me want to stop living the way I have most of my life. I know that the route from here isn’t going to be a painless, uninterrupted incline toward optimum wellness. But I am determined to make the climb and not give up.
Even as I write this, I feel fatigued, my eyes heavy and it’s only 2:46 in the afternoon. That’s not a great feeling when you have five children to homeschool, a business to run, dinner to make, and a household to maintain. I wear a lot of hats these days.
At the outset I thought I’d share some of the stats I knew about my wellness two weeks ago. I was weighing 224.6-pounds which, for a man of barely 6-feet is far too heavy. I can do one pull-up, 2 chin-ups, about 10-push-ups if it’s a good day. I am able to run about 1-mile comfortably… comfortably is probably being too generous. I can barely bend and touch my toes most days. My lower back hurts almost every day. My diet is mostly vegetarian but is filled with plenty of processed foods and beverages. I exercised infrequently, stretched almost never, and built muscle even less. My sleep routine was equally bad. As for stress management, it mostly consisted of mindless entertainment and night time snacking and eating.
These past two weeks I have been making small changes to many of these areas and as I said, I have started to see some initial improvements, which brings optimism to the endeavor. I believe that slow growth will be better and more lasting than the sporadic efforts of the past that brought quick change but was not sustainable.
So here is my starting point. Well I guess two weeks ago was my starting point, but either way, I am starting here because it’s the only place I can start. Hopefully one year from now I will be glad I started today.
I plan on sharing parts of this journey with you, in part because it helps me stay the course, but perhaps it will help someone else along their own wellness journey.
From my home in Almost Heaven,
Matthew xo