Saturday 12th October
Maintaining health should be looked at as an average over time. Our bodies are constantly either moving toward, or away from, a state of health.
One way to look at this is the leaky bucket analogy. Everyone has a bucket of health. When we do things like eat, think, and move well, a bit of water (or health) is added to our bucket. Unfortunately, some things in our lives make holes in our bucket. Such as excessive alcohol, lack of movement, traumas, etc. We can’t always ‘fix’ the holes in the bucket. So, we must make sure we are constantly topping up the water through healthy habits.
Too few health promoting habits will cause the health in your bucket to decline. Initially, this is hardly perceivable – like a pebble in a pond (the water displacement is far more difficult to notice than putting a brick in a bucket of water). It will take months or years to notice some of the smaller holes in your health bucket. At which point, it can be far more difficult to fill back up.
Once we have lost a certain amount of water (health), we can start to notice symptoms. Symptoms are warning signals from your body that something is not right. We need to reduce the activities which create holes in our buckets and increase those which top up the water.
How we maintain health is to keep looking at the level of water over time.
Pay attention to what foods give you energy and help you sleep well vs. those which give you indigestion / gas and feel tired. What exercise and behaviour makes your body feel good and energised vs. those which deplete you. What thoughts help move you towards you goals and bring you peace vs. those which take you further away.
Activity trackers are one way to help you know, via tracking, how much health promoting activities you are partaking in. They measure and track a whole range of things from daily step count, sleep quantity and quality to how long you are exercising for, etc.
