Take a Lifestyle Leap

L.E.A.P. - This acronym stands for Lifestyle, Education, and Practice. We believe these are three keys to starting, maintaining, and mastering life changes like New Year’s Resolutions. How do we leap into a new lifestyle? With all of the New Year’s Resolutions flying around, what makes one stick and another fall flat? We believe it is a combination of three things, a change in lifestyle, consistent education, and lots of practice.

Lifestyle - Whatever change we decide to make, whether it’s diet, exercise, or losing weight (the top three New Year’s Resolutions), the changes themselves aren’t enough. Simply adding something makes the change unsustainable. Think of life as an equation, if we add something in, we must balance the scale and take something out. When we add exercise in the morning, we subtract sleep. Know what is on both sides of the equation. Is it sustainable to get 3 hours of sleep every night because of all the things we are trying to accomplish? No. The changes that we include need to change our lifestyle. Vowing to eat better cannot be accomplished without changing our lifestyle to match, meal prepping and joining a group of common minded individuals is a must in order for eating healthier to take hold in our lives. A simple change is not a simple change, it makes ripples throughout our entire lives.

Education - This piece is extremely important. Without educating ourselves continually on the process and outcome, we can never reach the end goal. Let’s take for instance working out, without the initial education of simple workouts we will get to the gym and not have a clue what to do; we end up working out on the line of machines and leave tired but feeling like we accomplished little. Continuing on with working out we cannot do the same workouts year after year, our body gets used to the workouts and plateaus. As we get further and further into our goal, the ways in which we accomplish the goal need to change, like changing the workouts in our routine. The education of self cannot only happen at the beginning of life change, but it must also happen throughout the process of change… which is always. We need to always grow, our minds expanding and actions becoming deeper and more complex.

Practice - Without continual practice, we cannot accomplish our goals. Daily we need to practice restraint and good judgment if we want to lose weight. For some goals, we need to practice day to day, while others we need to practice minute to minute. The loftier goals we set to accomplish are quite often the ones that require more intentionality to them. So often we seem to fail at one of the days or minutes, we say, “all is lost!” There is a famous saying, “Progress, not perfection,” that applies to situations like these. All is not lost when we seem to fail, progress daily is what we should be seeking, not an overnight change. And when we do fall short, there is another day and another minute around the corner. We don’t need to wait until next week or next year to start again.