There seems to be an excuse for everything these days: too hot, too rainy, too busy, too tired, too overwhelmed and on and on. And what makes this sort of attitude so frustrating to me is that being surrounded by it tends to have a somewhat negative effect on me! The age-old concept of surrounding yourself with people who make you better continues to grow stronger and stronger in my mind, while the trainer, coach and motivator in me desperately desires to be positive influence. But negativity begets negativity. Negative parents have negative children, negative friends have negative friends, and on and on until we sink into a society that is overflowing in negativity, excuses and horrible health. While reading Robb Wolf's awesome book The Paleo Solution, he mentioned a little something I tried today when I went down to the local coffee shop to get some work done. I sat for a good 10 minutes and watched people as they came and went and did an immediate assessment on how they looked. Tired? Happy? Fit? Ill? Fat? Now this could be construed as being judgmental, but I made a point of keeping it as objective as possible. Hell, I know that sometimes looks can be deceiving, so I simply looked at them and moved on. What hit me so quickly was how depressed and out of shape everyone looked. I literally saw nobody over the age of 15 that held themselves in that oh-so-obvious "I feel damn good right now" way. I also saw not one single person, children included, that appeared to have any real athletic ability. Again, many of them may have, and of course sitting at a coffee shop in the burbs at 11am is probably not the best place to hang with fitness geeks like me, but seriously? Whatever issues you have: stress, stomach problems, insomnia, IBS, headaches, back problems, anything; it is because of poor choices you have made in your lifestyle. Go ahead and blame it on anything you'd like, but I can pretty much guarantee you that if you take a little time, you'll be able to trace it all back to YOU. And when you're sitting on your couch, eating take out, or snacks, or desert or whatever, soaking in all the insanity TV has to offer you each and every night, perhaps a little spark can light up somewhere inside of you that says "right now I am getting sick". Maybe tomorrow night when you're done with work you can go outside, no matter what the weather is like; you can grill dinner over an open flame no matter how long it might take; you can sweat a little and get an elevated heart rate no matter how tired or overwhelmed you might be? Perhaps tomorrow night you can decide that you are going to be a little healthier than last night, and that the next night a little healthier. Perhaps you can take a few of you're precious moments to learn a little about what is really good for you and what is really bad for you. Perhaps you can feel better than you do right now...Or will you have an excuse not to?Never Stop, GET FIT.Josh Courage
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