Choices, Challenges and Change

Albert Einstein said “Life is like riding a bike, once you stop, you fall off”.

It appears that in our lives, there is no status quo. We have to make the choice, the conscious choice, to continue to grow, to continue to expand, to become healthy and to take on a healthy lifestyle. We have to actively pursue this, to remind ourselves, to remind our subconscious how we want to maintain and sustain our body and mind.

Conversely, the opposite of maintaining our wellbeing is deteriorating, and without active maintenance and positive methods of doing so, our body and mind deteriorate and gradually break down. As young kids, we continually challenge ourselves but we soon learn through peer pressure that it’s ‘safer’ to conform and to be “cool”. Increasingly, research shows that illnesses that affect us later in life begin in early childhood, including the poor choices and patterns we learn as children.

Negative choices are those actions which put destructive pressure or stress on your and mind. These include poor diet and lifestyle as well as a negative or apathetic attitude. A poor choice may not be a major problem – for example a Christmas indulgence or celebrating a birthday – but that indulgence repeated over and over again becomes a problem and represents an accumulation of poor choices. It may not affect you in the short term but an accumulation over the weeks, months and years of your life will affect you adversely.

No one puts weight overnight, but many people gain weight on over two or three years or even ten or twenty years. The weight gain is an accumulation of poor choices. It may be that one extra piece of bread a day or the fact that you stopped walking around the block or a combination of both of these.

Culled from: “The DEAL for Happier, Healthier, Smarter Kids; A Twenty-first Century Survival Guide for Parents.” ~ Dr. Peter Dingle