When I titled this entry, I chuckled at its simplicity and duh factor. But at the end of the day, staying fit and healthy is a mental challenge, and you need to provide yourself the best method to stay in the game. Based on your daily life filled with work, family, social, financial, and other worries, it’s not as simple as it may seem. My last blog post was about resolutions and how I feel they can be a recipe for disaster as you can set an unrealistic goal for yourself based solely on a date on the calendar.

My definition of living a healthy lifestyle is one that you will see everywhere – good nutrition and exercise. It all starts with good nutrition, because no amount of exercise will offset bad nutrition. With that said, I have changed my viewpoint on nutrition, based on my change from a cardio based eat low-fat low carb mentality to a resistance training with some cardio and tracking macros approach. I find the latter to be more sensible, as it allows for more flexibility with the enjoyment of food. With bodybuilding, simply put, you calculate your TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure) which will provide you calories to eat to maintain, and then adjust your eating habits if you want to lose weight or gain mass (cutting and bulking in the bodybuilding world) by eating 10-20% above TDEE to bulk and 10-20% below TDEE to cut. Using an app like MyFitnessPal has been an invaluable tool for me, as I can control my weight fluctuation based on my daily food intake because I know pretty accurately what I am eating. You have to eat every day, so smart nutrition is a daily work-in-progress.

Exercise is the wild card, because each of us have different abilities and circumstances. You may like running, or weight training, or cycling, or indoor cardio, or taking fitness classes. There are almost endless possibilities in what you can do to stay fit. I could sit here and tell you based on my research that resistance training is probably the best method to stay fit, as you can use resistance training to gain lean muscle while still enjoying heart-healthy cardio benefits, all of which will help you with weight control. I’ve spent 26 years actively “working out” – started with a Nordic Track, did lots of cardio for decades with the elliptical, running, spinning, etc. Now I am weight training, using cardio only for its heart benefit and doing such 1-2 times per week. Muscle burns fat as well if not better than spending 1 hour doing cardio that might burn 400 calories, whereas after a weight training session your body continues to burn fat. I’ve proven this to myself, as I can control my weight better now than I used to on the cardio train.

At the end of the day, when I mentor others with their fitness goals, my only true objective is to find a program that a person wants to do every day. Regardless of all the research out there comparing various forms of fitness, if you are doing any form of fitness, it’s better than doing nothing at all. I may not personally like to run, but if that’s your thing, then you should be doing it. Exercise for me is a release. I enjoy it as it helps clear the mind and give me a sense of accomplishment, all the while knowing I am doing something good for my body.

Don’t let anyone fool you – challenging yourself with working out and eating healthy on a regular basis is a huge undertaking.

I am currently weight training for the first time in my life, and here are my feelings at the end of week #1, as posted in a workout challenge group I am a part of:

This morning I don’t feel too sore since yesterday was rest day, but after Build:Chest/Tris that will change. As you’ve seen me post about a few times this week, I feel differently about the nutrition and it’s effect on my body and mind. I personally don’t enjoy eating this much food. Some of it is physical (stomach) and some is mental (coming from years of a lean approach). Tomorrow morning I will take my 7 day measurements which I’m not looking forward to (I know when I see the weight and BF% I’ll probably just shake my head and turn away mumbling “trust the system”).

Running a calorie surplus is the mental challenge for me. It took me a long time to get to the lean person I was happy with, and to switch mentality from lean maintenance to mass gaining takes a lot of discipline. With that post, I received a nice detailed response which leaned towards that person supporting and motivating me to continue on. Here was my response:

Thanks for the detailed reply. Let me make something really clear – I may voice displeasure with the calorie intake, but I hoped my words made it clear that I have no intention of straying from the system. I’m not adjusting anything from the guide, and will eat the calories with the proper portion %’s. You should understand that I’ve been at this for decades without a shred of outside motivation, no accountability partner, and lots of doubters. My dedication and commitment to my efforts is a fire that burns entirely within, and over the decades the flame only gets bigger.

It’s physically and mentally challenging doing any sort of exercise. Being it’s my first time resistance training, it takes some time finding the proper weight to use while working on keeping perfect form to minimize the risk of injury. Physically, I just push myself where the last rep I can barely complete while keeping good form. It’s the mental challenge that’s most difficult. I have no problem getting my workouts in each day, and I’m sticking to the nutrition plan. The difficult part as I stated above is I have spent years to get to the leaner/harder person I am today, and have approached nutrition to maintain the 150 lbs. and 12% body fat I was at. Now, at 2,800 calories per day, in my first week I gained 3 pounds and 1.3% body fat. I understand that I need calorie excess to gain mass, but it’s still hard watching decades of hard work “appear” to be going down the drain (I know that’s not true). But I have a goal to gain 10 lbs. of muscle, so onward I march.

The point of illustrating my mindset is the mental challenge to keeping up with your healthy routine of fitness and nutrition.  I have self trained myself over several decades to be dedicated and committed to living a healthy lifestyle. I have fought those internal voices that tell me to stop and have ignored the external voices from those who don’t understand, and realized that instead of channeling my efforts externally to find a support system that didn’t naturally exist, I needed to work on my internal support system – The Fire Within.

Get an accountability partner if you can. Hopefully you have many people supporting you. And reach out for motivation when you feel yourself in need. But you must work hard on the fire within, for at the end of the day, only you push that button to exercise and only you can control what you eat. It’s a challenge, but it’s worth it since you’re working on being a healthier you.

Vacation. The time to “escape” from reality and have some fun. But alas, it can also break that nice little routine you may have going with your workouts and eating. So how do you prevent a vacation from a setback?

The answer may not appear simple. There are so many vacation scenario’s – an all inclusive cruise or resort; a trip to a major destination (Hawaii, Paris, The Caribbean, etc.); visit family; camping….and more. Each poses it’s own issues with regards to keeping up with your workout program, and more importantly can really throw curveballs at your nutrition (I was just in Oahu, Hawaii, and the food choices were wide and varied and all so tempting – and I think Hawaii has the best food of anywhere I’ve ever travelled to).

But there is a simple answer. That simple answer is: Think ahead and plan accordingly. Think about your particular trip and what’s available to you, and adjust your plan of attack accordingly.

Here’s a few thoughts on scenario’s I have experienced first hand:

On cruises, many ships have fitness facilities, so there is no problem getting in some sort of exercise. You can jog around the deck or on a track if the ship has one. Also, see the next paragraph for in room ideas. Regarding food, you can order off the menu and ask for less butter etc. Just portion control, and hold back on licking the plate clean if the portions are large, and indulge in a few bites of the delicious deserts instead of devouring the whole thing. I haven’t been to an all inclusive, but I assume it’s somewhat similar.

If you travel to a hotel with a kitchen, great. Make your own breakfast and lunches to save $$, and maybe even a dinner or two. Make something fancy – you’re on vacation. At restaurants, try to order smart. Request cooking in little or no butter, get dressing on the side, don’t get desert. Look for hotels with fitness facilities as many have them, even if they’re small. Buy a set of exercise bands for travelling. You can find discounts at local gyms if there are any. You can jog. If there’s a pool, swim laps for 1/2 hour. You can find simple routines on the internet to workout in your room – combinations of crunches, squats, lunges, burpees, jumping jacks, push ups with variations, mountain climbers, sprinting in place. These are all things that can be done in any room without equipment.

Camping is no different. When you treat yourself to a restaurant, there’s usually healthy alternatives for you. And cooking and camping go well together. Chicken, pork, fish. Salads and steamed veggies. As far as exercising, same as with hotels (minus the fitness facilities). You can bring bikes along. Maybe you’re into kayaking. In my case, I take my exercise mat, DVD’s, and my laptop along and workout at the campsite.

In short, there’s really no need to treat a vacation much differently then at home. Maybe you’re escaping work, or family issues – a vacation is about cleansing the mind. But with your own body, nothing should be different. Nutrition wise it may be more challenging if your only alternative are restaurants, so you just have to commit yourself to ordering healthy and maybe not finishing everything. Any supplements you take at home should come for the ride and be taken every day as you always do. Maybe you have to modify a protein shake if you use a blender, but with ice and water and a shaker cup you should be at a minimum good to go. There is always a way to workout wherever you are. It may not be your regular routine, but something is better than nothing.