If you had a crystal ball that could show you the person you will be in 20 years what type of person would you see?  Would you see a vibrant, healthy, active older adult or would you see yourself shuffling behind a walker, drooling into your soup bowl, unable to find the right words to form a sentence, obese or frail, sick with disease or even worse dead?  Aging will occur no matter what.  We are all on the same path between birth and death.  Some of us, however, will age more gracefully than others and some of us will live longer than others.  The worst case scenario I can imagine is living the last 10, 15 or 20 years of your life decaying instead of living.  That won't be my destiny.  It doesn't have to be your destiny either.  You are the architect today designing your future as an older person.  You have actually been designing your future all along through your lifestyle choices and decisions.  So tell me do you like the person you have designed so far?   If you are fit and healthy and filled with energy then congratulations and keep up the good work.  If you are embarking on this New Year with the typical resolutions to lose weight and get healthier then you have been incorporating some design flaws into your lifestyle blueprint.  It is time to make some changes.  It is never too late to make a change but the key will be consistency from this point forward.  Consistency, however, is the Achilles heel for most people that do not understand the predictable pattern of steps necessary to make a change become permanent.  I won't lie to you.  Change is difficult but not impossible.  When you are looking at making changes that will impact the rest of your life it is important to know what to expect and how to get through the challenges so that success is inevitable. Pay attention.  I am about to reveal the roadmap to your destiny. 

1.   1)  " I don't have time to exercise." 

            You think you lack time because everyone and everything else is more important to you than you are.  Nothing should be more important to you than you!  Make yourself a priority! Your health and happiness depend on it.  Amazingly, I have even had people tell me that they feel they are being selfish if they take time to go exercise.  Honestly, I think it is more selfish if you don't take care of yourself.  Taking care of yourself today is like an insurance policy protecting others from having to take care of you when you are ill or incapable later.

2  2)  " I'm too out of shape to go to the gym.  I might be embarrassed." 

            I can assure you, no one is paying any attention to you working out because they are too busy wondering what you are thinking about them.  Sitting at home in a recliner won't solve that problem and while you are sitting there your body is hard at work decaying.

3.      3) " The gym is too crowded."   

            So go at a different time or exercise someplace other than a gym. 

4.     4)  " I don't know where to begin or how to do the exercises." 

            So how about starting a walking program? Something is better than nothing and eventually you can add more and more into your routine as you become more confident.  If you want to participate in weight training, a sport or a class then there are people paid to teach you how.

5) 5)  " I never stick to a program anyway so what's the point." 

            The point is that your future depends on it.  You cannot let the past dictate your future.  Keep your eyes off the rear view mirror and focus on the road that lies ahead.  Your failures in the past were necessary for your future success.  They showed you what didn't work so you can focus on new things that will work.  But it may have simply been that you did not have a strong enough motivator to push you past the challenges everyone encounters with change.

            The ultimate motivator for change is one that causes anxiety.  Personally, I do not want to be old when I get older.  What I mean is that I want to be active and fit enough to take care of myself well into my eighties and hopefully beyond.  My mother seemed elderly in her sixties while I knew women in their eighties with more energy and vitality than her.  The main difference was that the other women remained physically active and my mother never exercised a day in her life after high school.  My mother was frail and shuffling by the age of 65.  She was fearful of falling because of osteoporosis.  And sadly, her ability to hold a coherent conversation was beginning to wane.  She died at the young age of 72; bitter and miserable.  My definition of high anxiety:  losing my health like my mother.  As God is my witness, I will not become unhealthy like my mother and I will do whatever is necessary to make sure that I will not.  Anxiety is indeed a powerful motivator.

            Fear may be a powerful motivator but one must also come to terms with accepting the facts and adapting to reality instead of living in a fantasy.  There are laws of nature that cannot be broken.  They have been and always will be the governing force for millions of years to come.  No amount of wishing or complaining about them will make them go away.  We live in a modern society where food is plentiful and the most energy we need to expend to get it is to drive to the grocery store, put some items in a cart, take them home and pop them in a microwave.  We don't even break a sweat doing it.  Unfortunately, our bodies are programmed to live in nature where only the fittest survive.  Our DNA has not caught up with our evolution.  We are a complex bundle of chemical messages stuck in the Stone Age.  In the Stone Age when times were good, hunting and gathering took place and our activity programmed our bodies to grow, get stronger, be alert and survive.  In bad times such as stress, winter, famine or drought, our bodies were programmed to shut down and conserve as much energy as possible.  To add insult to injury, as we leave the childbearing years and begin to age our genetic code is set to accelerate our decline to assure there is more food available for the young and those in their reproductive years.  Yikes!  It appears we are doomed by our genetic code.  But have no fear.  There is a way to trick your body into thinking you are hunting and gathering again.  You can override the signals with daily exercise and not overeating.  Exercise stimulates growth and recovery.  Being sedentary stimulates the rate of decay by slowing everything down and breaking things like muscle down and using it as a fuel source.  Overeating won't help.  It signals to our primitive brain that a famine must be near so our bodies naturally store the food as fat and use it as a fuel source of last resort.

            Exercise produces some wonderful benefits that can assist in reducing the speed of aging.  Exercise creates a hormonal environment conducive to fat loss, increased muscle strength and increased energy.  It lowers bad cholesterol and increases good cholesterol so it decreases the risk of heart disease.  Exercise has been shown to increase mental focus and concentration so it is a natural deterrent to dementia and Alzheimer's disease.  Regular weight bearing exercise builds strong bones so your risk of breaking a hip and becoming an invalid decreases.  Exercise will increase your strength and stamina making it easier to do your everyday activities.  It has also been shown to be a fabulous stress reducer and stress causes chemical messages that result in your body shutting down over time.  Finally, exercise reduces the risk of breast cancer in women by 60% because exercise decreases body fat which is a catalyst for the production of estrogen which is linked to breast cancer.

            The facts are in.  Our genetic code dictates that we be active in order to remain young as we age.  Our body responds to exercise in a positive way and responds to inactivity with an acceleration of the aging process.  At this point, you have arrived at stage three?the time you make a decision.  You have a choice.  You can resign yourself to the continuing spiral downward or you can get off your butt and do something about it.  Ultimately the choice is yours.  I cannot make it for you.  I have made my choice and I am smack dab in the middle of phase four?action!

            The action phase is a great place to be.  It can be exciting and wonderful.  You will notice changes in the way you look and feel.  There will also be changes taking place beneath the surface in the millions of chemical messages taking place within your body on a daily basis.  But the truth about action is that if you fail to plan you are planning to fail.  If you want to make sure you stay inside this phase for a very long time then you must do a little prep work.  If you do not, be prepared for the occasional lapse or even a full blown relapse into your old ways.  If that should happen, relax and learn from it and then move forward with a revised strategy.  The prep work that should be done in advance includes:

1S 1. Get a reasonable and obtainable goal and put it on a time schedule to stimulate
    action.

2.    2.    Make exercise as important as your job.  We all get in the habit of going to work
    even when we don't want to because we know it is vitally important to make
    money.  It is also vitally important that you exercise to offset what nature and
    poor choices has put into motion.  How often do you call in sick for work when you
    are not sick?  If you said never then why would you call in sick when it is time to
    work out?  Organize your time for success.  Set a time for exercise when it is most
    likely you will actually do it.  Personally I am a strong believer in exercising first
    thing in the morning.  It sets the tone for the entire day and it is done before
    anything can distract me.

 3  3.  Tap into a passion by doing something that you enjoy.  My new passion is
      spinning.  I have never done it before and now I am so addicted to how good it
      makes me feel that I get up at 5 am for a 6 am spin class on days when I do not
      even have to be at work until 11.  Your goal should be to weight train a minimum
      of 2 times a week and do some form of cardio at least 4 times a week to trick the
      primitive brain into believing you are one of the fittest and thus worth of survival.

TT 4.  Take a photo of yourself now and then again 4 weeks from now and so on. 
     Sometimes nothing motivates someone more to start exercising than a picture
     that shows they are more out of shape than they realized.  Then the progress
     pictures continue to motivate you as you get leaner and leaner.

kk 5.  Keep a journal.  Keeping a record of your progress will show you the improvements
     you are making over time and are helpful during those times when you just
     can't see it any other way.  Progress will lead to results like compounding interest
     can build your nest egg.

fif 6.  Finally, find a fitness role model or mentor.  Model your behavior after someone
    you admire and ask yourself what that person would do when it comes between
    choosing to exercise or not to exercise.  More than likely, that person will make
    exercise a priority and will always find a way to make it happen.  If that person can
    make it happen, you can too.

      If you are in the action phase for awhile, you must be prepared for some curveballs and roadblocks.  They happen to the best of us.  But if you choose to learn from them and view them as valuable learning tools then you are definitely on the road to our final stage of change?self-accountability.  Self-accountability is when exercise and eating right have just become part of who you are and feels as easy as brushing your teeth.  Our goal at IEM is to help guide you so you can learn to make your own course corrections along the way so that someday you do not need us to maintain your health and fitness lifestyle.  At that point, our job is done.  But until you reach that point we are here for you every step of the way.  We walk the walk not just talk the talk.  There is probably no obstacle we have not faced at some point.  To get where we are today we had to overcome those obstacles.  So consider following our lead.  We have chosen to eat right and exercise to ensure that we can grow old gracefully while living life to the fullest. 

  So make this New Year the year you evolve into the new you.  Become the person you really want to be.