One of the activities that I want to share in this blog is working towards becoming healthier through exercise and losing weight.
As I have thought about this my vanity creeps up and asks how much am I willing to share. This has been a back and forth conversation with myself this last week and this conversation continues. I will try to navigate within the boundaries of my vanity while at the same time sharing enough to make it pertinent.
This last year I turned 50, an ominous age. I hope the next trimester of my life is as good as the first, but I’m definitely leaving this one in worse health than I began the first one. Being overweight is having ramifications in my health. Spending 22 years in an office environment hasn’t helped the situation. A comfortable life breeds small behaviors that over time, and when combined with other small behaviors, contribute to a long term journey away from optimum health.
During this time of great transition in my life, taking on additional changes will not be felt in the same way as if no other transitions were happening. Maybe this will add an extra 5% to the difficulty and complexity of what I’m going through. For a little additional discomfort, these changes will make large difference in the long run.
I’m not one for fade diets or quick fixes. I’m one for changing the underlying bad habits and then allowing these changes to play out over a longer time. So I work on creating new habits to replace habits that aren’t working. It takes longer and can be harder to accomplish but in the long run I think it will work.
In his book “Path of Least Resistance”, Robert Fritz talks about the idea of creative tension. Creative tension is a force that is created by dissonance created in the mind between what our current reality is and what our future desires are. The creative tension force can then be used to propel a system to the future state with little expended energy. Or put another way the energy to remain in the current state is higher than the energy required to move to the future state creating the path of least resistance.
Without a clear future state, our body and human systems strive to resist change, to maintain homeostasis. This allows us to spend the least amount of energy to complete tasks, and is an important survival trait from when our ancestors roamed the Serengeti. But today with computers, TVs, and cars our biggest problem isn’t the conservation of personal energy expenditures—homeostasis keeps us on the couch in front of the TV, parking in the spot next to the door, spending hours in front of the computer screen, and and basically not moving.
From Dictionary.reference.com:
ho·me·o·sta·sis [hoh-mee-uh-stey-sis]
–noun
1. the tendency of a system, esp. the physiological system of higher animals, to maintain internal stability, owing to the coordinated response of its parts to any situation or stimulus tending to disturb its normal condition or function.
2. Psychology. a state of psychological equilibrium obtained when tension or a drive has been reduced or eliminated.
Defining the two end points, the current state or current reality and the future state or future vision is the secret sauce the makes creative tension work. In Lean workshops, creative tension is the dynamic that is being used to realize gains after the workshop is complete. When I facilitate, I may know very little about how people are do their work, but I do know how to create the tension that will propel them forward to a more efficient workplace.
This is what I will attempt to do with my own health situation, create a tension that will help move me towards a desired end state.
Step one is concerned with getting really clear about the current state. If you don’t know exactly where you are at, then you won’t know the correct direction in which to move. People have a tendency to avoid this step. They either assume they know it or just don’t want to jump as quick as possible to the future, but this is a big mistake. It is extremely important to get very clear and precise about the current reality.
Over the last few days, I been developing a baseline of my current reality. Since I turned 50, I had a complete physical not too long ago, and have a numbers on all the major health indicators. So I don’t have to gather this information, but I do need to bring it out and review the data and then go a step beyond just reviewing. It isn’t enough to just know my cholesterol level, I need to understand what this number means in terms of my current health and what it means if I stay on my current life path. This will need to be done for all of my health indicators.
In part II, I will go further into creating the current state of my existing health. Will look at some easy and not so easy measurements to understand physical health.
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