21 Days to Change Your Ways: Just Keep Swimming

Anything great takes time. We look at the best parts of others and compare them to the worst parts of ourselves. Quick fixes, gadgets, ab crunchers, weight-loss shakes, we are suckers for the overnight ‘answers’ to our health issues! No one is healthy and happy without some long-term effort. But the cool thing is, small and realistic changes over time can create massive shifts in our wellbeing! So no matter where you’re at in your health journey, just know that so long as you’re making consistent and positive changes, you’re doing a fab job!

I personally find 21 to be a magic number. It is well known that it takes ’21 days to make or break a habit’ although there doesn’t seem to be any clinical research behind it, but I also find that the body really starts to respond to any change in external stimuli after 3 weeks. In terms of weight training, we see quite immediate strength gains as we start to lay down neural wiring to facilitate these new movements, but after 3 weeks we can start to notice muscular growth too as the body learns that we mean business!

If you are mid-way through Dry July right now, you may be starting to feel a little despondent. Listen to Nemo and ‘just keep swimming’ because not only are you raising money for adults living with cancer (YEAH, you’re AWESOME!!) but you are also at a crucial point in detoxing your insides! Our bodies are constantly renewing and re-building themselves with new cells every second, so be patient and stay focused, keep reminding yourself about how great you want to feel and let that fuel your drive and determination.

When I lay my groceries down on the conveyor belt, I love to feel proud of what I’m giving to my body and congratulate myself for choosing to nourish and not punish my insides. Try it yourself. Take a well-rounded view of the foods you are purchasing and imagine them inside your body, inside your child’s body. In a week, your body will be made of those foods. Do you want to be made of artificial, empty nutrients? These fillers and chemicals slow us down. They are so foreign to us that they require so much energy to somehow be converted into fuel, or our body may say ‘stuff this, too hard’ and it ends up being stored somewhere as fat or toxins within our fat.

My key message is this; consistently make healthy choices, and your body will change at the same rate as your mindset and habits.

Powerful, huh.

Set yourself not only long-term health and fitness goals, but also remember to write down the steps you need to take in order to get there! And if you don’t know the how, get some help! Only Hamish and Andy ran a marathon without proper training first (I hope!)… the secret to success is all in the mind. Commit yourself to feeling great and you’ll leave yourself no other option.

Good luck and keep going! Be healthy & happy, always!