Making Healthy Changes: Define Your True Reason for Health
How My Love for Nutrition was Born
Making long-term changes is hard.
Knowing what to do to be healthy isn’t the biggest challenge that we face. It’s knowing how to do it – consistently – that’s the challenge. And knowing how to do it must first include learning how to want to do it.
You can be provided with the most therapeutic list of foods to eat and recipes for how to use them, but if you haven’t aligned your personal values and goals with the effort needed to make those recipes – they are of absolutely no use to you. You might use them, temporarily, but within a short time, they will succumb to the fate of other recipe and diet books that line your shelf.
An important first step to initiating and making changes is to understand where you want that change to take you – your true reason for health.
Defining Your Health Destination
All new members of CARE are asked to define their health goals, as well as, their ‘health destination’ – where they want the success of their personal goals to lead them. This includes describing what ideal health looks and feels like and how being at their health destination benefits their days and quality of life.
When we are working towards our health destination, we live more fully aligned with our personal values – the qualities we most want to reflect in our lives – such as compassion, leadership, loyalty, honesty, vitality, and to make a difference.
Personal values are different from goals. Goals are the steps you take to live according to these values. And this is the first step to finding the motivation to making healthy change – align your values with your goals. See, clearly, how taking steps towards your health goals allows you to feel the things most important to you – like balance and contentment. Conversely, watch how unhealthy behaviors keep you from living more centered in your values and prevent you from feeling the way you want.
The feeling – my personal value – that motivates my long-term commitment to making healthy changes is contribution.
We Are All Accountable to Each Other
I created Perfectly Produce because I wanted to experience how I define my true reason for health – to live from a place of creativity and contribution. This is how my love for nutrition was born.
If my body and mind are the incredible instruments that I was given to make this contribution, I feel I am accountable for making sure that these instruments are sharp and ready. When I don’t do this, when I make decisions that compromise my productivity and creativity, I am liable not just to myself but to whomever I was supposed to help, be there for, or otherwise support. My husband, my family, my neighbors, my community, my self- someone is compromised when I make unhealthy decisions.
I don’t make the right decisions everyday, some days not even close – but I do always continue to try. This is how my love for nutrition continues.
Each day that I get to work on Perfectly Produce, I see more clearly how it is my creative expression – one of my contributions. I am and want to be, accountable to each person that is connected to Perfectly Produce. When I look back at my initial business planning notes (pictured above) and see the Perfectly Produce logo within them, the stem determined to blossom, I’m content knowing I’m where I’m supposed to be.
Here’s to all of us experiencing health, together, so that we protect the ability to share and learn what each of us is supposed to teach. We are all that important – that accountable – to each other. Here’s to all of us making changes, together.
Warmly,
