Being an entrepreneur focused on doing sales and expanding my network made it more difficult to have a routine schedule. My everyday routine feels like it is a roller coaster that is constantly under renovation.
I just can’t predict what will happen in the near future. And when I say the near future, I mean a 2 to 24 hours from now.
This makes it extremely difficult for me to establish a healthy physical routine – such as eating at the right time, knowing what my meals would be, as well as knowing when I can exercise.
Over 8 years of this kind of lifestyle and it has successfully made me severely overweight.
2 years ago on December 2017 I weighed the heaviest I’ve been at 206lbs with a height of 5’8″.
I felt heavy, I lost confidence in how I look, I felt lethargic almost everyday.
This being the case,I had to wake up, stop, look back and pivot drastically.
Eating to Live instead of Living to Eat
I’m a foodie. I just love to eat. I don’t take photos of what I eat – I just eat them.
But reading this book “Chris Beat Cancer” has opened my eyes to the monster of an industry that is cancer. The pharmaceutical industry is making a huge, huge killing profiting from cancer.
And having cancer is not pretty at all. I think of it as sort of living dead – but with lots of pain. I would never want to have cancer and by God’s grace and hard work, I hope that this will be the case for my health.
What use is it earning, saving, investing and influencing others when at the mid part or the end of your life, you will lose all your money and your family’s money and joy to cancer?
The best way to go, it seems, is to structure life in such a way that you can ensure it never happens. Because cancer is not genetic. It is a consequence of your way of living – what you consume (eat and drink), how you go about your day (habits), and your environment (pollution). The last of which, we can do almost nothing about.
Good thing we have control of our consumption and habits.
So I set out to build the life structure I wanted for myself to live a long, healthy and happy life.
I was able to do it generally through three things:
- Intermittent Fasting
- Cutting down unnecessary carbohydrates
- Drinking freshly squeezed lemon + ginger juice every morning
Someone said that the body controls how we feel – as it is the one that releases our emotional chemicals such as dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and so on. So if our body is in bad shape, we will really feel bad about things in our life and make bad decisions.
As an entrepreneur, manager and leader, I cannot afford to make bad decisions.
Intermittent Fasting
Intermittent Fasting made a lot of sense – the rise of breakfast as the most important meal of the day is a marketing push by cereal companies in the USA during the 1940’s.
The fact of the matter is, breakfast was not really the most important meal of the day. In fact, in some cultures, breakfast did not exist at all. The industrial age helped push the importance of breakfast because of the working hours cycle – ensuring that the workers had energy and oomph as they punched the clock and timed in.
But this is no longer the world we live in. A lot of us can forego breakfast – especially the tons of unhealthy options that are pushed our way.
The intermittent fasting plan I follow is not strict because I do drink freshly juiced lemon and ginger after I wake up. My house help does it for me every morning. And recently I added our homegrown Moringa Oleifera (A.K.A Malunggay) to the mix – which did wonders and shed some of my weight further down.
I have been experimenting my morning fresh juice further by making it more disgusting to the onlooker – by adding 2 chopped garlic cloves as well as 1 teaspoon of pure Curcumin powder.
I’ll be adding a teaspoon of Amla powder soon enough as well.
The juice is not at all refreshing or delightful to drink. It is quite disgusting actually. But it is only half a glass each morning – this boosts my immune system by a huge margin. It also boosts my body’s anti-cancer system as well as my metabolism.
The Temple
“Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own;” – 1 Corinthians 6:19
The body is the temple of the Holy Spirit – Holy Spirit being God, our body as the temple means that in the Physical world, it is the most important thing we can take care of. Without it, we cannot do anything else physically.
In the Bible, the first temple of God built by king Solomon is an extremely extravagant structure that is dedicated wholly to the worship of God. We are even more complex than any structure on earth.
“Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex! Your workmanship is marvelous—how well I know it. “ – Psalm 139:14
I have put off taking care of this temple for far too long. And maybe you have too.
It is not too difficult to take better care of it – there are only 2 major things we can control. Our consumption and our habits. I eat pretty much anything after breakfast. I do watch out for bad carbohydrates – which I intentionally cut down on. This is anything that is refined such as white sugar, white flour, or white rice.
As for sugar, I try my best to forego it completely.
For my habits, I do admit that I have not been able to establish a regular routine for exercise still. But in the 2 years since I started this journey, I have already shred 23 pounds. It’s a slow and steady process as it is surely a lifestyle change.
I do believe that if I’m in better control of my habits, things will improve drastically for the better for me.
Some of the things that I already feel better about due to this lifestyle change:
- I have more energy to spare after work and meetings
- I feel better about myself – on stage and off stage
- I feel lighter when going up the stairs or doing strenuous activities
- It is easier for me to shy away from unhealthy food
- I am able to share this journey with other people – including you
I’m 30 years old as I write this and I do hope that it is still a good time for me to be more dedicated in living better. The payoffs will be in dividends as I grow older from hereon out.
After all, we are all getting older, aren’t we?