Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Living a healthy lifestyle! The struggles...

Living a healthy lifestyle can be a struggle.  The first thing I noticed when I became more engaged in my healthy lifestyle was eating healthy is expensive.  It's so much cheaper to grab something off the dollar menu or something unhealthy from the grocery store.  Anyway, I was set on changing my diet.  First, I got rid of the pork.  Lord knows I use to love eating fried pork chop sandwiches, pulled bar b que pork sandwiches, and fried bacon.  So, I ditched it!  It wasn't hard and that was about eight years ago.  The next thing to go was ground beef.  I actually replaced it with ground turkey but letting go beef was hard.  Ultimately, it meant no more pot roast, homemade hamburgers, etc.  That was about six years ago.  At this point my diet consisted of chicken, turkey, and fish.  I'm not a big vegetable person so I rotated the veggies I did enjoy: green beans <-- acquired taste, sweet peas, corn and few other things here and there. Fruit has always been consistent in my diet.  Now, I've given up chicken and turkey and I only eat fish! *sad face* This was a real struggle at first but I got over it! I wanted to see if it would make a difference with toning my stomach. I can't say that it didn't or it did.  But now I'm not eager to go back to eating either so I'm just leaving it out of my diet.

The other thing I noticed about a healthy lifestyle is it requires time that we sometimes "really" don't have.  Well, we could make time but it's so hard to decide between a workout and watching Scandal! It requires moving things around in our schedule.  I've learned it's all about sacrifice.  Everytime my alarm goes off for my early morning run, I'm thinking to myself what the hell was I was thinking.  At the end of the run, I'm thinking I'm glad I didn't miss this run I feel amazing.

Living a healthy lifestyle is challenging.  For many of us, it takes us out of our comfort zone.  It forces use to eat differently from what we are accustomed to.  It forces use to change our daily routines and engage in more physical activity.  Honestly, most of our parents weren't very physically active.  A healthy lifestyle often has us living outside the realm in which we were raised.  It can be a little uncomfortable at first, especially when you visit home and everyone is asking you why are you working out, not eating this, yada yada.  My answer was and is simple: "Because I want to be healthy and I refuse to be a diabetic, have high blood pressure, and all the other preventive diseases that plague our communities and families".  I usually get a lot of eye rolling and stuff like that but who cares.

One of my Facebook friends just recently made a status that asked the all too important question of why are we so unhealthy.  Not just as blacks but as Americans in general! We pride ourselves on so many things yet we struggle with healthy lifestyles!

4 comments:

  1. This was a great read. Thanks for the shout out. I totally agree with everything that you have said. Being healthy is certainly a challenge but so is getting a degree or doing anything worth accomplishing. Anything worth having is worth working for and making changes for. People want the results but don't want the work. Thanks for writing this.

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    1. Krystal, I agree. Most people do want the results but are not willing to put in the hard work. A question I've been pondering is why is this. For a lot of people, it has to do with their way of thinking and in most situations it is the way they were brought up. Thank you for posing the question that got me to thinking. I look forward to sharing more healthy lifestyle moments with folks.

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  2. Can we say AMEN hair issues!!! Love this post... It hink I will do one similar. I will tag it back to you so be on the look out!

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  3. Great post. Changing to a healthier lifestyle definitely put me way out of my comfort zone. I was raised in the south and ate fried everything growing up and being healthy wasn't even a thought. Both of my parents have health issues and I refuse to continue that cycle.

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