Monday, August 11, 2008

My Three (Health) Things

The Institute for Integrative Nutrition has a series of Warm-Up Classes for enrolled students to work on before classes start in January. It helps harness our enthusiasm for holistic health and helps prepare us for class. Many of the assignments are geared to raising our awareness of our own health, as well as getting us to see first-hand what an impact these changes can have. Puts us in the client's shoes, so to speak, so we'll have a better understanding when we start to counsel folks. The Warm-Up Class I did last week asked us to list three things we could start doing immediately to improve our health. Here are my three.

1. Begin a meditation practice. In progress.

2. Resume my yoga practice. I've made excuses for not doing this yet (time and money...), but am committed to reintroducing yoga this week. Even if I decided to sleep in instead of going to the 7:15a.m. class today.

3. Get a better grip on my finances. It might seem strange to have this under health goals, but money causes me more stress than just about any other piece of my life that I can think of. If I can get enough of a sense of control over my finances, I suspect I will feel a new sense of lightness and have more energy and mental space to devote to more healthful, joyful things. For starters, I'm going to spend some time this week getting better acquainted with the Quickbooks software I bought back in March.

There you have it. Three manageable health goals to focus on. I found this exercise quite helpful, and would encourage you to try it. Once you start making goals, you'll probably come up with a list of more than three things you can do to improve your health, but I'd encourage you to limit it to three. Beyond that it can get overwhelming and unrealistic to tackle all at once. Prioritize, and as you feel you accomplish different things on your list, then rotate in the next one.

Feel free to share your list in the comments section!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I found your blog through a friend, and it's inspiring--I want to follow your example! (for starters, I dumped the rest of my Coke down the drain after reading about six posts, so you've just saved me from 10 oz of battery acid in my system, for which I thank you.)

Your decision to get finances in order intrigues me. Have you seen this article? http://www.womentowomen.com/womenshealth/moneybasics.aspx
The advice they offer in this article resonates with what you're saying, so check it out if you haven't seen it already--your link to women to women shows me you're familiar with their site, but it's a BIG site and sometimes you don't always find some of the gems on it!

Anyway, best of luck in your quest.