Episode #348: Saving Time by Achieving or Maintaining a Healthy Lifestyle

Hey there friends. Welcome to today’s episode. Thanks so much for joining me, as we’re mid October almost already so crazy. I hope you’re having a great month so far and that you are feeling good feeling healthy. And you know, I’m excited to dive into today’s episode, we are obviously talking about some time saving. And I don’t know about you, but I am always drawn to anything that I can read or listen to research on productivity and time hacks and whatnot. And I’ve done a lot of episodes in this kind of vein and dealing with this theme before I’ve shared some books that I’ve read specifically about being you know, a good time manager and all of these kinds of things. And there’s a lot of automation and systems and batching and like tips and hacks that we can apply to our lives to try to do this. Okay, so you could go back and listen to those kinds of episodes. read some books on this. What most successful people do in the morning or Laura Vander cam or van der Kamp, I’m not sure how, which way her last name is. There’s a piano and or not, but she has a couple of productivity books like that. And just time management books. I know one was specific about women. And I remember finding that interesting all that kind of stuff. So lots of resources there. Kind of more in the general like theme and idea of what I want to talk about today is not actually these nitty gritty practical things, I will talk practical, because I do like to leave you with something that you can directly apply and, and hits home with you. But I’m what made me think about this more today and talking about just this idea about how we actually can save her own time, by being healthy is kind of what I’m talking about not the save time with meal planning, save time with your workouts but and I again have given tips for that, I can tell you how to streamline your workouts and how to be planned and whatever. And I have go back and listen to our healthy fall prep series. A lot of that was tailored to this idea. I’m talking more about how you being proactive about your health and fitness and putting yourself in a good position. And in a healthy spot for as much as we can control, you know is typically going to save us time in the long run. Now, there was some meme or I don’t know Instagram post or something that I’ve I’ve seen a lot but I saw it again recently, which got me thinking about this something along the lines of make time for your health now or make time for illness later. And I know this is a trip tricky idea and topic because there’s so many things that were like, well, that was out of our control or whatever. That’s totally true. I remember when I was working as a teacher, the sweetest most wonderful secretary worked at our school and she was like, very healthy. I think she was even totally plant based. Either way, she ate tons of vegetables. Like basically, you know, anything that you would have said to try to be anti cancer is how I saw this woman living, not overweight no like exercise regularly again, I saw her literally eat like whole peppers as part of her lunch. And she actually had cancer and beat it, you know, overcame it went through treatment and all that which is amazing and is a beautiful, you know, end to that trial and illness in real life. And not all obviously again and that way and some people get sick for different reasons like that we can’t get rid of every single factor that could make us sick, you know, like making sure our water is perfect, our nutrition is perfect. Our environment is perfect. We don’t use pans with toxins. We never have seen oils, like all the like there’s a lot between the Wi Fi that we sleep, you know and within our room at night and this and that that like could make us sick. So know is I’m not suggesting that by doing a workout. I’m not dumbing it down to that right and saying if you do a workout every day, and you eat at 20 Like I encourage 80% healthy foods and 20% treats. You’re definitely going to you know, never have cancer and never have any other kind of illness or sickness or thyroid problem or whatever, why we just can’t guarantee that we live in a fallen world that has a lot of honestly like health traps, okay. And a lot of times when we think we’re eating healthfully, we’re not because of food marketing. Those are the kinds of things I try to talk about zeros, right, you know, with. However, I have seen friends, family clients, lots of people through the years who treat their bodies like they’re always going to be working well for us no matter what we do to them like they They don’t, they don’t need XYZ, like they don’t need to go to the gym, they don’t need to do a workout, they don’t need whatever, because they’re just naturally healthy than that catchy kind of quote unquote catching up, but then then maybe having a big injury, or like a foul like, there’s so much to health and fitness, where we can be proactive in preventing injury and illness. So that is what kind of buys us time back. Because I think a lot of times, we think we’re kind of just like cheating time. Like, we don’t need to do that stuff, because we’re already healthy, or whatever. But I know for me, I’ll speak personally here. There are definitely things in my life that I could spend less time on, in order to get back some time and health and fitness that are not going to matter as much down the road. So for example, yes, I want to have a clean organized home. But I probably if I’m seeing Oh 70 and able to move well, I will be happy that I can move well, and that I put that time into the exercise and nutrition department. And I’m not going to remember if my house was like immaculate or pretty decent, you know, but the other way around, if I don’t give any time to workouts and nutritious food and all that kind of health and fitness stuff, being proactive, but I’m so obsessive about having an immaculate house, I don’t know it’s 70. If I cannot move well, I cannot get on the floor with grandkids, I cannot, you know, I’m like wheelchair bound. And again, for reasons that maybe I could have helped, like movement is medicine, and I could have you know, kept moving, I think I would look back and be like, Wow, I don’t really care that I had, you know, my cupboards were vacuumed out every other day or once a week or whatever. Like, I wish I would have taken some of that time into my health and longevity. So we can’t have every area on, you know, 10 out of 10. But I think we need to pay a little more attention to getting ourselves and maintaining what we think is a balanced idea of healthy now there’s a huge scale here. And I’ve talked about that before on the podcast where there’s some people who will say well, yes, then if you’re trying to be your absolute healthiest until you’re 100 years old, you need to do red light therapy and you need to do sun and you cold plunges you need to do this, then have a four hour morning routine. I think you need to decide what’s best for you what you see is optimal health. For me. I am trying to maintain a healthy body weight, healthy body fat, to keep all my numbers in levels, things we start caring about as we get older, like cholesterol and blood pressure and all that, you know in check. I want to enjoy food be able to go out on a date night and have a burger to be with my husband. But I also want to, you know, mostly eat a lot of vegetables. A lot of high quality proteins have treats in moderation. Keep up with my kids, but not expect to be able to be a marathon runner at 70 Like I honestly some of you might listen to me and think like she is on the side of like, extreme like she does, you know, 50 mile races or this or that. Yes, I sometimes do that kind of stuff because I think it’s fun. I enjoy it or I like the you know mental and physical.

What’s the word I’m looking for, like obstacle or challenge to try to overcome whatever but I don’t think that when I’m you know 60 I’m going to be an ultra runner just as now what I do right now I just do some random things sometimes. But I think it’s fun to train for. So find your what you were shooting for. And that makes everything easier. Because when you’re like, Well, do I need to do a three hour workout? Do I need to do this that like, alright, what exactly are we going for? Okay, something I want to talk about and compare this to is it takes less time to maintain a functioning car than it does to maintain to deal with big breakdowns every few months. Okay, I relate to this very heavily, because we have you used cars we’ve always had. And my husband is the newest one. That’s a 2015 Mine’s a 2009. And you know, they need maintenance from time to time, but it is always better to like schedule an appointment, go get things taken care of before something just thank God actually in our garden angels and everybody else that we actually haven’t had a breakdown in a long time. But before this, I was driving a Mitsubishi and it broke down a couple of times. And it was never ideal. Like once I was literally like about to merge onto the highway. I veered off and like my car is shutting itself off like I need to get off. We’ve we might have all been in that position. Maybe not maybe drove newer cars. But it’s not a great position to be in when all of a sudden now you don’t have a car for five days or you need to call a tow truck like you were on your way somewhere. I was I remember I had my oldest now who’s six but he was like one in the car with me and we were going to work at a learning center where he was in the nursery with me. And I had to call them and say I’m not making them because my car broke down on the way and that happens but what’s much better or is to like, get the routine maintenance going on. Now, obviously, say you have a newer car, save an old car, look at it any way you want, it’s a lot easier to just stop. We don’t even think twice, about stopping to put gas in our car. You know, it’s like, okay, maybe it’s inconvenient, maybe in the winter, we’re like, oh, this is cold, don’t really want to do it. But we suck it up, and we do it. You know, we’re not like, I gotta be motivated to put gas in I gotta be the, you know, hopefully things that we think with health and fitness, like I need to be motivated to work out I need to be motivated, healthy. No, you just go put gas in your car. Because your car needs gas, it keeps it going. Unless you want to run out of gas in the middle of the highway. When it’s not going to be a good time, you are now going to be inconvenienced, you’re probably going to inconvenience somebody else by them having to bring a gas like the whole shebang, it’s easier to just keep the ball rolling and stay healthy than it is to like have, you know your your health completely derailed by some big. I’m not just talking illness. I mentioned this before. But like working out, especially specifically strength training is shown to help prevent injury. Like if you fall on ice or something like that, if you have muscle built up around the bone, you’re less likely to break a hip. You if you do single leg training and talked about this a lot in our workouts, you’re less likely to injure the tendons and ligaments around the knee. Like if you just twist weird or fall weird, because you’ve trained them before. You know, think about like if you spend time doing a workout where you’re training your core training your back to move in a certain way, you’re less likely to throw out your back when you’re putting a kid in a car seat like we need to look at our health. In this way of just routine and maintenance. It is taking a lot of time, if we overhaul it all the time. There are this is like the yo yo diet and the yo yo X or the bandwagon exercise your mentality of like, I just need a new thing. And then we throw ourselves into a new thing. And it takes a ton of time because an energy to learn something new and do something new. Whereas if we find something we can just implement, and then keep going like me doing a 25 minute workout five days a week is not a big deal. Like it gives me so much return on that investment. To be able to move well be mostly pain free, be mobile, be relatively strong, like these kind of be a healthy fat, you know, body fat, all these things. For what, 25 minutes a couple times a week like that’s nothing if we can look at things with a kind of zoom out, look at the big picture that I don’t think we think about our health as an investment and we need to a little bit more. Now, I do want to talk for a second about if you are making it harder than what it needs to be, you can scale it back because it should not be this huge, cumbersome thing to you. Now, when ladies come into the eight week challenge I offer an eight week challenge is still going on right now. But we are not doing another one till January. Do it every couple months. It’s an eight week challenge where I teach you how to track your macros learn about eating the right balance for your body of carbs, fat and protein. That’s what your macros are. All That Jazz, it does take a little bit of time to get that down. If you’re totally brand new to this and this is foreign, it takes some time, then the idea is to very quickly getting you to be able to just do it on your own to be able to run it on autopilot to eat intuitively, to just get your workouts done. So a lot of ladies come into the challenge and they’re not doing any strength training or maybe running or doing some cardio or not working out. And then we again, these nutrition pieces are not in place. It’s a lot to learn at first, right? Totally acknowledging that, but then want to keep it rolling, it’s so much easier to just keep keep the ball in motion right then to get momentum. And that’s what I want. You know, those of you who are in the chasing greenness group with me or who have been working with me for a long time or in your own group for a long time, you know this, you see that it takes minimal time and effort when you’re already in the midst of things compared to when you started, right. And that’s with anything you can think about that and apply that. So I do want to talk for a second though about people who are making it harder than what it needs to be you can always scale it back. Okay, I’m talking to you if you think your workout needs to be hours long, like you do not need to work out for even an hour unless you’re specifically training for something that needs endurance, okay, you don’t need to spend hours meal prepping. This is another thing like I used to do. Back when my husband I were dating and then engaged in married I would always prep on the weekends and I would make a bunch of ground turkey and this and that and have all our stuff ready to go in the fridge. Well now, I think to my life was a little bit different. We’re a lot more on the run and on the go and you know training on and off jobs and passing off Kid when we only had one. And now that I’m a little bit more home based, it’s still a lot of running around and activities. It’s more like kids activities and things. But I am usually more like home based for naptime or something I know like I can typically make a meal at naptime or something like that. But, you know, I have realized I’ve just come to, you know, embrace that you do not need to spend hours on food on the weekends, because I would not be able to still maintain that I would burn out if I thought that I had to spend hours. What I do instead, what I try to teach you ladies to do and promote doing in these programs and in these challenges is to like, just make your efforts go farther. If you are making a big batch of turkey meatballs, make four batches of them, and throw three in the freezer. If you are making grilled chicken, double it. And then boom, you have lunches for the whole week or you can recycle dinners tonight. I’m going to make case ideas with grilled chicken I grilled a couple days ago and I had no idea what I was making today. I actually did not meal plan this week. And I’m like, okay, great. We have a ton of grilled chicken laughs So that’s ready to go. So you need to find a way that you’ll be able to maintain the things you need to do in a way that fits your life. Now I say you need to know your brain and can you just tell me little tips. Our lives are all different, right? What was gonna work for one of you is not gonna work for the other lady. Excuse me and whatnot. Like we we have to find what works for our season for our routine for our systems. But what I want you to take with you and hopefully different episode today is that hopefully all of us want to be healthy for life. We don’t want to just be healthy for 30 healthy for 20s healthy 40s Like, I want to be a fit grandma like I don’t want to be I’m not striving to have 20% body fat at 65 and be you know, a grandma in a bikini. And maybe you are maybe that’s where you are going to when you think about what your health and fitness looks like maybe that is your goal. That’s fine. I just want to be able to get down and play with my grandkids my hopeful imaginary grandkids on the floor, like be able to take walks, go for hikes with my husband do that kind of stuff and putting in the time and energy now is going to have such a payoff later. So that my friends is how we are going to save time by being healthier. All right, I hope that inspires you to just keep along the journey. I will talk to you next time when we talk about how to recover from soreness. Until then have a great rest of your day. Bye

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