Slow Change is Lasting Change: Health and Fitness for Sustainable Wellness

I had a great time recently when our 15-year-old grandson Jameson came for a visit. It was a visit with a purpose - he wanted to learn how to get bigger and stronger for the upcoming lacrosse season and trusted his grandpa to teach him how to do it.

Life doesn’t get any better than spending time with someone you love and teaching them about one of your life’s great passions and helping them along the road to greater health and fitness. Helping them make positive movement on the Health Continuum. But at the end of the week, I realized he had taught me more than I had taught him.

I demonstrate a great functional exercise on the weight machine to show my grandson; it takes both balance and strength

I repeatedly explained to Jameson that lasting change is incremental, it takes time. I told him that daily, focused, and intense, consistent effort over time is what will make you stronger and faster, but it takes time. You need to be patient and trust the process. One of the great things is that the patience and ability to work hard that you develop through your workouts are transferable to other areas of your life, such as school and relationships. The exciting part was that by the end of the week, I think he got it.

Then it hit me. I had spent the last six months forgetting this basic lesson of fitness and life that I was trying to teach him. In November, my wife and I returned from 18 months in Canada where we were full time volunteers for our church working with 18-35 year old single adults. It was a fabulous experience. I had left the full time work force in order to serve, to publish my book and begin my podcasting and blogging career immediately upon our return.

Life had other plans and a few days after we got home we were hit in our car by a young man who ran a red light on his way to high school. After the accident I was unable to do much of anything except sleep and eat and I am really good at eating. I went for the longest period of my adult life not working out. I rapidly moved in a significant negative direction on the Health Continuum and into a state of depression.

An illustration of some examples of whole foods within a balanced diet.

Fortunately, I found a great medical team which helped me along my physical recovery. It took about six months with lots of physical therapy. My brain has been a bit slower to recover but it is getting closer each week. Unfortunately, the weight I gained during my inactivity and bad eating stayed on. (I do want to note that I could have easily been killed or injured far more seriously, and I am most grateful that didn’t happen and consider myself very fortunate that it did not.)

I was fairly patient with my physical progress (my amazing physical therapist may slightly disagree and she will be on my podcast shortly), having rehabbed various injuries over the years and trusting the process. It was a different situation with the extra body fat I found myself lugging around.

Slow Change is Lasting Change: Health and Fitness for Sustainable wellness

My podcasting ambitions helped motivate me to turn things around and begin to make sustainable progress again.

After all, I was about to become a health and fitness podcaster. You don’t go to a dentist with bad teeth, and you aren’t going to listen to a health and fitness podcaster who doesn’t look fit.

I wanted it gone immediately and convinced myself I could just make a radical eating adjustment for a few weeks and get the problem solved. Of course it didn’t work, just read my book. I stayed in this mode for longer than I want to admit.

My week with my grandson helped me see my folly and come to my senses. I was finally able to turn things around and I am now making sustainable, incrementable progress. Now I could blame my poor thinking on my concussion and hampered brain, but I think it is more an example of what happens to most of us. We want instant results. We want to be fixed now. There has to be a way. The problem is there is not a way, there is no instant solution. It takes time. Slow Change is Lasting Change.

The Health Continuum is a journey, and lasting change is worth it

I still find myself being impatient and wanting it to be here tomorrow but I am committed to trusting the process of eating healthy and encourage you to do the same. If you need some motivation, spend some time teaching a 15-year-old because the best way to help yourself is to help someone else.

Let me know if you have successfully dealt with the challenge of being patient and trusting the process. I would love to hear about your experience.

What are you able and willing to do today? One strand, one change, today!