What are the healthy steps?

The healthy steps lead you gradually, step by step, toward a sustainably healthy way of living for the rest of your life. Losing excess weight is a healthy thing, and dieting will usually work for the goal of weight loss. If you do it with outside help (like special foods or weekly meetings), you may have found that when that outside help goes away, the weight usually returns and you end up feeling unhappy as well as unhealthy. By changing the reasons you became overweight and de-conditioned, the healthy steps guide you in making personal choices that will permanently give you a confident physical body.

Your body and your state of health are made up of the decisions you make about exercising and eating.  You ate the doughnut, or drank the milkshake, or sat on the couch instead of going for a walk. You made those choices – and the condition of your body today is the sum total of all those choices you have made during your lifetime. Your mind may have learned to function in negative ways, but you can retrain your behaviors and reprogram your brain for a healthier you.

Most Americans are overweight because they have poor eating habits and do not exercise regularly.  Did you know that as we age, we tend to get weaker each year? Without exercising, we lose about 2 pounds of muscle per year, so we have less muscle, and muscle burns calories. This makes it easier to gain weight, and so we move less, and it becomes a vicious cycle.

Thindex  provides a way to break that cycle. There are guest speakers and diet and exercise news at the Lodge, as well as a blog and Rose-A-Day. If you visit these roses every day you’ll find affirmations for your journey to better health, and something else: you may notice that these roses are not professionally grown or photographed. They all have tiny imperfections in them just like we all do, and isn’t that part of our beauty? We hope you will share these roses with a friend – often weight loss goes better if you have a friend to share your victories. Next year when the first rose “blooms” again, you will be fitter, thinner and healthier – forever.

You may have dieted before, so this isn’t your first rodeo, so to speak! In order for this to be your last diet, there have to be some changes – in you. When you change the way your brain makes decisions, you can lead a healthier life. A life you choose, by making better choices every day.

When you follow the healthy steps, your fitness and health will improve and your life will become better and much more fun. If you think of the healthy steps as a “stairway to health”, like taking the stairs instead of the elevator, you can imagine the good choices you can start making. If you look back over your life, you may find that some of the things that were hardest to do were also the best things you did. The healthy steps are a starting point for the rest of your life.

I could wish you the best of luck taking the healthy steps, but I don’t actually believe in luck. I believe in you.

Oh, I almost forgot! Moving toward health includes dropping harmful foods and adding foods that do have value. Some of these foods may seem addictive. You will need to drop some dietary items every few healthy steps; once a food is dropped, it no longer has a place in your home.

What are your personal food problems?

1,______________________________

2_______________________________

3.______________________________

4_______________________________