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Health & Fitness

Where are you?

I'm reading a book my wife recently gave me, entitled: 5: Where Will You Be Five Years from Today?

It begins: "The best day of your life is the day on which you decide your life is your own ... Life is about the choices you make ... Start by choosing the two most important 'guiding stars' -- your values and your mission. Choose your values: Values are personal choices you make about what's important to you. Being guided by your highest values brings immense satisfaction and meaning to life."

I want to share with you my mission: to reduce the prevalence of obesity and related diseases.

This is my calling, my purpose, my life's aim, and inspires me the most.

I have aligned myself with a franchise and non-profit with similar purposes: To empower women through body transformation (Get In Shape For Women) and to reduce the economic and social burden of obesity and obesity-related chronic disease by improving the quality of science in nutrition and obesity research (NuSI).

Helping others can be a wonderfully selfish thing to do: I can't think of something that brings more immense satisfaction and meaning than to dedicate my life to a cause greater than myself and to help people reach and maintain their goals.

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The Wheel of Life, Small Tasks, The Debt Snowball, and Small Wins

While the wheel of life has many different spokes which all need attention -- I want you to think of the "health" wheel and about your five year goal.

Then, heed the statement by Henry Ford: "Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs."

You may sometimes think of lofty goals as being insurmountable because they are so far out of reach when you are contemplating beginning (and often never do as a result). And, when you finally embark on a weight loss program and see no visible progress for a few weeks (even though we are getting healthier), you will quit.

This is one of the challenges we face: it may take you a few decades to go from lean to obese, however, you are not wired to be patient, positive, and persistent even when you are reversing 30 years of decline. It takes 360 months to put on 50 pounds and you want it to come off in 36 days. The scale reads "195" after starting at just over 200 lbs over two months ago, and you want to lose 50 lbs of fat by the winter holidays and it's August 15. Bloody heck.

Certainly, another issue we need to deal with is setting realistic expectations and looking at problems and solutions in context: at this rate of loss, it may take you about 18 months to lose the weight. When thinking about this in the context of a five year plan, you are far ahead of schedule.

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Dave Ramsey, a financial author and radio host is known for his "Debt Snowball" strategy: let's say you have three loans: 

  • Student loan: $25,000 @ 6% APR
  • Mortgage: $100,000 @ 5% APR
  • Credit card: $8,000 @ 20% APR
  • Car loan: $1,000 @ 6% APR

The basic premise is that you will pay any minimum payments and after that you take any money you have left over for debt repayment and put it towards paying off your smallest debt. This strategy may not be "optimal." It is, however, effective. The math says you should be paying off your highest interest debt first, psychology says you should pay off your smallest debt first to create momentum in your debt snowball.

In the book Switch, Ramsey says, "Let's face it, if you go on a diet and lose weight the first week, you will stay on that diet. If you go on a diet and gain weight or go six weeks with no visible progress, you will quit. When training salespeople, I try to get them a sale or two quickly because that fires them up. You need quick wins to get fired up. And getting fired up is super-important."

Paying off your car loan is a BIG small win: it is motivating to check it off the list and move on to the next smallest debt.

Think about trying to motivate your teenage son to clean the house. This is a daunting task, to say the least. Now consider you ask him to spend five minutes cleaning the bathroom today and see how much progress he makes. It is likely he can get the bathroom clean and gleaming with five minutes of work. This is the small task, the small win, and it is building momentum in reducing your son's "dirt snowball."

You can have some serious small wins in health by making some big dents in your "Illness Snowball." Eliminating the sugar-sweetened beverages as well as the refined and processed carbohydrates can show significant results on the scale to get you fired up for your journey. From a long-term perspective, making small changes, such as drinking more than 64 oz. water a day, can be incorporated along the way, with little effort. Before you know it, you will have assimilated many healthful traits that you once thought would be impossible to maintain at once.

Being educated helps provide direction: eating less does not work for fat loss. Neither does moving more. If they did, obesity would be non-existent. I am happy to talk to anyone who will listen about why we get fat and what we can do about losing the excess and living healthfully.

Small wins lead to big victories. Paying off your debt, cleaning your house, reading a 600-page book, and reaching your health and fitness goals begin with a small step - and consistent small steps thereafter.

While small wins are important and critical, it is also important to begin with the end in mind: where do you want to be in five years? How about 260 weeks? 1,825 days? 2,333,000 minutes? Begin with the end in mind...and then start from the beginning: the journey of 1,000 miles truly begins with that first, educated, and purposeful, step.

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I will wrap up by sharing with you our purpose, mission (our motto), and core values -- this is our raison d'être -- it's why we get up in the morning and go to the studio:

Purpose:
  • To Empower Women Through Body Transformation

Motto

  • Results Through Relationships

Core Values

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  • We treat our customers like family
  • We have a passion for health and fitness
  • We believe in the power of positivity
  • We wow our customers by exceeding expectations
  • We check our egos at the door
  • We are continually learning
  • We believe in honest, open communication
  • We believe accountability leads to success
  • We love what we do
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Have a great week and set aside some time to think about your mission and values from a health and fitness perspective - where are you and where do you want to be? It is our purpose to help you get to that place.

Committed to your success,


Bob Kaplan

P.S. Speaking of goals, it was 44 years ago last Saturday (July 20) that the U.S. decided they were going to put an American on the moon in less than a decade.

"We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too....it will be done. And it will be done before the end of this decade." -JFK, September 12, 1962

Live your life on purpose.

Bob Kaplan independently owns and operates six Get In Shape For Women studios in Massachusetts: Bedford, Wayland, Wellesley, Westford, Weston, and Winchester. Bob has a Master of Business Administration (MBA) a Master of Science (MS) in Exercise Physiology, a Bachelors Degree in Nutrition, and is a nationally certified nutrition coach (Precision Nutrition) and personal trainer through the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA-CPT).

Bob also serves as an independent researcher for the Nutrition Science Initiative (NuSI), a non-profit organization dedicated to reducing the economic and social burden of obesity and obesity-related chronic disease by improving the quality of science in nutrition and obesity research. Bob has more than 15 years experience as a personal trainer, exercise physiologist, nutrition and exercise program coordinator, freelance health and nutrition journalist, as well as a diet, health, and disease researcher, contributing to multiple New York Times Best Sellers.

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