5 Things I Gave Up To Start Getting Healthy

5 Small Steps To A Healthier You: Transforming Your Body For a Purpose

In episode three of 'Life On Purpose,' Heather discusses the importance of health and how to achieve it through five actionable steps. She emphasizes the necessity of small, incremental changes over drastic resolutions that don't last. Topics include stopping excuses, reducing added sugar, moderating alcohol intake, ensuring adequate sleep, and managing snacks. Heather ties the importance of health to fulfilling God's purpose, encouraging viewers to make mindful decisions for a better life. The episode concludes with a preview of the next episode, which will focus on healthy self-talk.

00:00 Introduction to Episode Three

01:17 The Importance of Small Steps

02:27 Why Health Matters for Your Purpose

03:29 Step 1: Stop Making Excuses

07:07 Step 2: Cut Down on Added Sugar

11:25 Step 3: Moderation with Alcohol

13:46 Step 4: The Importance of Sleep

16:18 Step 5: Managing Snacks

20:05 Conclusion and Next Week's Preview

Transcript

0:00

Hey ladies. Welcome back to episode three of Life On Purpose. I'm Heather, and I'm so excited to dive into today's topic with you. We're talking about the body and how we can make small, intentional steps toward being the healthiest version of ourselves so we can impact the world for Jesus. Now, don't worry, this isn't going to be one of those two hour podcast videos that fire hoses you with so much information that you can't remember half of it. Nope. We're gonna be taking it slow, keeping it simple, starting with five actionable steps that you can do that will incrementally make a difference. And we might just laugh a little because let's face it, while our health is serious, life is too short not to laugh along the way. And I've heard laughter is good medicine. So grab your coffee or maybe your green smoothie if you're feeling a little extra healthy today or guilty, I don't know. And let's chat about how we can live not just longer lives, but better lives. Here's my mantra for my health right now. I don't want to be the youngest person in the nursing home. I want to be the oldest person in the gym. I need that cross stitched on a pillow somewhere. Let's do this. Okay, so let's start with this. Have you ever tried to change everything about your health all at once? You know, like on January 1st when you decide you're gonna eat clean, work out every day, meditate and pray, drink a gallon of water and sleep eight hours a night all at once. Yeah. How'd that go for you? I'm filming this in April. Don't ask me how it went for me. I've been there. Probably more times than I care to admit. Really, it's like trying to climb a ladder where the rungs are spaced 10 feet apart. You'd have to lift your ankle up to your ear just to get to the first step. I'm gonna assume you can visualize this so that I don't have to try and demonstrate it. I might need an ambulance. My husband actually sent me this meme a couple of weeks ago that showed two ladders. One with normal steps and one with giant gaps. And the title was The Importance of Smaller Steps, and it hit me. Success comes from small incremental steps, not from trying to take giant leap where we do it all at once. That's what we're gonna do today, breaking it down into bite-size changes that actually stick. Now before we get into the nitty gritty, let's talk about why this matters. I mean, sure, we all wanna feel good. We all wanna look good. There's nothing wrong with that, but there's a deeper perspective here. What if God calls you to do something big, like fly across the world to serve in an orphanage or help rebuild a community after a disaster? If your body isn't healthy enough to say yes, then what? You sit on the sideline while somebody else gets to be a blessing to someone in need. And by the way, receive a reward in heaven. AKA. My last video, shameless plug, this was a wake up call for me. I don't want my health or lack of it to hold me back from living out my purpose. So whether your why is about being there for your kids, showing up for your grandkids, or being able to say yes to the big things that God has for you, it's time we stop making excuses and start caring. Speaking of excuses, number one. Stop making excuses and start caring, you know, excuses. We all have them for why we can't work out, why we can't eat, right, why we deserve the chips or the cake or the glass of wine. We all make excuses, but are they really valid excuses? Do we really not have the time to work out or shop better? Can we really not make better choices with what we feed ourselves? I've made excuses before where I passed the Krispy Kreme donuts in the supermarket. It's like they intentionally put them right at the checkout area so that you have to walk right by them and see them. It is so annoying. There's times when I just wanted to accidentally ran my cart into the display, knocking it over entirely. But there's surveillance cameras, so. Instead, I've thought to myself on more than one occasion, I'll just do it this once and get back on track tomorrow. Also, it wasn't the entire dozen box, it was the half dozen box. So that's way better. Right, and I'm about to get real here, because if we don't get real, we are wasting our time. Here it is. I have sat in my car in the parking lot and ate three of those six donuts. Then felt sick and guilty and thrown the rest of them away before I got home so that nobody knew that I did it. Then I would get home and talk to my kids about why we shouldn't be eating excessive sugar. I hope my kids aren't watching or hearing this right now, but I made the excuse because I don't do it all the time. Now, I'm not saying that you can't ever have a donut. There will be donuts in heaven, I'm sure, but if I had to eat this in my car with no one watching, what am I really doing? Clearly there is something wrong. Am I the only one? Maybe. But I kind of doubt it. I had to retrain my thinking to tell myself that feeling good, having energy not causing my body to become insulin resistant was worth skipping the five minutes of momentary satisfaction of eating donuts. I've struggled with this for most of my life, and for the most part, I have been able to keep the monster at bay enough to stay moderately healthy. Most people who know me would likely have no idea that this is a struggle for me, but the older I've gotten, the more it has become a struggle and the harder it is to combat and it's not gonna get any easier. I am not getting any younger. I decided that it was time to stop making the occasional excuse that quite frankly turned into more of an occasional excuse if I'm not careful and choose to care about my health enough. I also had to realize that as the primary cook in my home, I was instilling in my husband and my children a lifestyle of either health or harm. We as moms or wives are usually the ones that provide the food for the house. And while it might seem fairly innocent to have snacks and chips and junk food when they're little, it's creating a lifestyle and a pattern of taste buds and preferences that they will carry into their adulthood. Thankfully, I believe there is a bit of a shift happening in our society towards more natural, organic, healthy food, which is great, but it's something we still need to be very aware of. So I stopped making excuses and started caring about myself and my family enough to make a change. I don't succeed every day, but remember, small steps still climbs the ladder. Number two added sugar. If you do a deep dive into the amount of things that have added sugar in them that you wouldn't even expect they would be in, or you wouldn't expect they would be the level that they're at, you'd be really, really surprised. Sugar is added to almost everything in the standard American diet. Things that we expect to be savory. Are loaded with sugar like pasta sauce, salad dressings, ketchup, marinade, soups, not to mention all the things that are processed that we already know have a lot of added sugar. And sometimes they're hidden so well in the ingredient lists, in the labels or used big words. We don't even recognize When we lived in Switzerland for two years, we ate their food. We got used to their pasta, their pizza, the sauces, et cetera, desserts. After about six months, we came back to the United States for a visit. And one of our family members ordered a pizza from Domino's. Now, this was something that we had done all the time before we had moved to Switzerland, but when we had come back after six months and we tried it, every one of our family members was shocked at how sweet the pizza tasted. We'd never experienced that before, but having gotten used to a sauce that didn't have sugar in it, it was actually like eating dessert pizza with pepperoni. It was gross and really weird. But I mean, is sugar really all that bad? Let's take a closer look. Start with your cardiovascular health Studies show that consuming too much sugar increases the risk of heart disease and stroke. High sugar diets are associated with increased blood pressure, chronic inflammation, higher triglyceride levels, all risk factors for cardiovascular disease. Another study found that individuals who consumed more added sugar had a 38% higher risk of dying from cardiovascular disease compared to those who consumed less. So if you want your heart healthy, less sugar. Now an obvious one would be weight gain and obesity. Sugar, especially in liquid forms like sugary beverages, can lead to weight gain. These drinks don't curb hunger and they make it easy to consume excess liquid calories. And these things hit your blood system so much faster in liquid form and lead to potential insulin resistance. Obesity, often linked to excessive sugar intake is a significant risk factor for other various health issues, including diabetes. How about your liver? Excessive fructose intake commonly referred to as high fructose corn syrup can lead to non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. The liver converts the excess fructose into fat. And studies have shown that people who consume sugar sweetened beverages daily have a 56% higher risk of developing non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. Now listen, if I'm gonna have fatty liver disease, it's gonna be from a margarita, not from a donut. I'm just saying. I mean, I don't need fatty liver disease at all, but you know what I mean? And now women, maybe the one that we care the most about, we shouldn't, but we do skin aging. Did you know that sugar can accelerate skin aging by attaching to proteins in the bloodstream, which creates harmful molecules called ags. It's advanced glycation end products. I am so butchering that I know. But these damage collagen and elastin leading to wrinkles and sagging skin. I'm sorry, did you just say that? Sugar causes wrinkles. I'm out. And finally, cognitive function. High sugar diets have been linked to impaired memory and an increased risk of dementia. Alzheimer's disease and stroke. Yikes. So now I read the nutrition labels like a hawk and try to find things that have minimal to no sugar in them, which sometimes unfortunately means I gotta make things on my own. Sauces and salad dressings and marinades. Some of those things you really just have to make on your own and really they're not that hard. Number three, alcohol. Speaking of fatty liver disease, now I don't have anything against alcohol in moderation and honestly, occasionally my husband and I will have a glass of wine at dinner if we're out or at, we're at an event. However, I've been tracking my sleep, which I'll get into a little more in detail in 0.4, but as an experiment, I've tracked the nights that I've consumed a glass of wine and how it affected my sleep, and it's quite frankly, dramatic. If you look at the research, while alcohol might make you initially feel drowsy, it actually interferes with your deep REM sleep and you will not have restorative sleep as a result. And if you're a woman entering any type of the lovely menopause or perimenopause, this will affect you even more.'cause you're already struggling with sleep. So while if you're in your twenties, you might be able to consume alcohol and not have it affect your sleep dramatically. The older you get, the more it will add in those added calories from the alcohol. it just makes it not really worth it at all. So what does it actually do to our sleep? Well, it suppresses REM sleep in the first half of the night. It decreases your overall sleep duration and increases the sleep disturbance or the amount of times that you wake up. It reduces the amount of restorative sleep, which is the deep sleep, the slow wave sleep that we all need. It also aggravates symptoms of snoring and sleep apnea. So grab that beer out of your husband's hand and chuck it in the garbage because the snoring is killing you too much. Maybe moving on. I have discovered some fairly fun mocktails and even some sugar free ones that can help you when you're wanting to have something kind of fun, just search it up on Instagram or TikTok mocktails. There's a bunch of restaurants that are actually coming up with great ones too. You just have to be careful of the sugar content in some of those. My husband and I have found that ordering club soda with lime at restaurants is actually really satisfying. It's hydrating and it feels like you're drinking something fancy besides just water. I mean, bubbles are always fun. Do you ever outgrow bubbles? I don't know. Number four, staying up late. I for one am a night owl. The life of the party. I love hanging out and staying up late watching movies, playing games, and quite frankly, I really actually like to sleep in. My husband, however, is the polar opposite of that, and wants to go to bed at 4:00 PM Okay, maybe not 4:00 PM Well, actually, he probably would like to go to bed at 4:00 PM but he has to work, so he settles for nine now for a while. I just let him go to bed at 9:00 PM and would stay up until 11 and then sneak my way in trying not to disturb him by taking approximately 15 minutes to crawl into a bed that creaks like crazy so that it didn't move and there was no creaking sounds. However, when I started tracking my sleep, I realized that by staying up until 11, then getting into bed, not really getting to sleep for 30 minutes or so later, I was not getting enough sleep. And it was affecting my mood. Don't ask any of my family members how it affected my mood. It just did. It also affected my energy and just overall the way that I felt. It turns out we really do need to get an appropriate amount of sleep. And a good quality of sleep in order to be functioning at an optimal level, you could work out right and be doing everything else well. But if you are not sleeping well, all of those other things are gonna be working in a diminished capacity. but how important is it really? sleep actually affects the body's use of energy and supports weight management. I wonder if I could lose weight sleeping. I should really sleep more. Even one night of a missed sleep can create a pre-diabetic state in an otherwise healthy individual. Seriously, one night. Sleep is essential for optimal brain function and mental wellbeing, emotional regulation. It helps manage the physical psychological effects of stress so that we don't kill our families. I may have added that last part. It helps cognitive performance, improves focus, concentration, judgment, and decision making ability. Like how many things in your Amazon cart should you actually buy? For me, I have found that by not eating past 7:00 PM not consuming added sugar and not having alcohol has been a major net positive on my personal sleep. I occasionally still have a rager and stay up till 11, such a party animal. Finally, number five, snacks. Dang it. Snacks. I love snacks. I love snacks at baseball games, football games, soccer games. I don't even watch soccer games. TVs, movies, 2:00 PM 9:00 PM 11:00 AM is there really a bad time for a snack. Unfortunately, the answer is yes. Snacks can absolutely destroy a good diet or a good diet plan or any plan at all. I had to learn that when I ate snacks, those were the times that I tended to overindulge because I wasn't typically counting the calories of the snacks or paying attention to how much of the snack I was eating. I mean, put me in front of a bowl of chips and salsa and I dare you to eat more than i'll. You start munching at a restaurant, and before you know it, you've consumed 500 calories worth of tortilla chips, all while justifying that the salsa is just made of veggies. So that's good for you, right? I mean, they're veggies after all. So I've had to cut off snacks for the most part and intentionally plan out my meals, but I am not telling you to cut out all of your snacks at once. And an occasional snack is fine. Once you've mastered control over it, what I would recommend you do is make a food log for one week of everything you eat without changing anything. Now stop for a second. I know that that's hard because if you're like me, when somebody says make a food log, suddenly you wanna change everything that you actually eat and just like list carrot sticks. You know, because you don't really want anyone to know that you just ate an entire sleeve of Oreos last night at 11:00 PM but actually do it for a week. Eat the way you normally eat. Count how many times you've had a snack. That's anything from one Oreo to a handful of peanuts to a piece of fruit. Anytime that you are eating something in between your normal meals, then look back and see the average snacks per day, and then the next week, eat one less. If you found that you had three snacks a day, cut it back by one and have two snacks a day for one week. Then the next week, cut that back by one and have one snack a day, and then none. And try to pre-plan those snacks in the morning. Like, decide today I'm going to eat a candy bar at 2:00 PM and three oreos at 10:00 PM and that's what I'm gonna have as a snack. Don't change what the snacks are. You don't have to make them healthy. This is such great nutrition advice. Nutritionists, don't come for me. Just hear me out. Just plan them. Write them down when you've had a snack so that you know you've had one, and that you're down by one and systematically pull back from your snacks so that you can actually achieve the goal of eliminating unnecessary snacks. Remember, the way we accomplish transformation is incremental change over time. And in community, that's what we're doing. We're incrementally scaling back the snacks over time. If you can grab a friend to do it with you so that you can have some accountability and be in community, do it and then watch how you feel. You don't have to be drastic, as we discussed at the beginning, drastic resolutions don't usually last. Now, if you've been eating healthy already and this isn't something that you need, that's wonderful. Maybe you don't need to change all five of these things. Maybe you just need to focus on one. Or maybe you need to help someone else that you love, implement one. But the overall goal is to not only affect change in our bodies, but live as an example to our families of how our bodies can be lived as a holy temple to the Lord, a living sacrifice, willing and able to do the things that he has called us to do. First Corinthians six, 19 through 20 says. Do you not know that your bodies are a temple of the Holy Spirit? Who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own. You were bought at a price, therefore, honor God with your bodies. We were bought with a price. We are not our own. We house the temple of the Holy Spirit living in us. What kind of temple are we offering him? Is it a shack or a beautiful home? Now let me be really real here for a minute. This isn't a shame or guilt video if You struggle with any of this. You are not alone. I am not alone. That donut episode the last time was about a month ago. Don't listen to the lies of the enemy telling you that you're worthless or guilty or unseen. You'll never change. And there's no hope. The exact opposite is true. Every week, we are going to tackle one aspect of our whole being as a woman of God, the body, the mind, the soul, and the spirit. Today was about the body. Next week we're gonna tackle a subject about the mind, specifically self-talk. What are you telling yourself? Are you telling yourself truth or are you telling yourself lies? what are you talking yourself out of and what are you talking yourself into? Is your self talk healthy? And if not, how can we change it? So hang on for next week and hang on in this community. Now if you're wondering why we need to care about any of this because you haven't seen or listened to last week's video on the why behind all of what we're doing here, I would encourage you to go back and watch or listen to that so that you can know the why behind what we're striving for and why we're wanting some lasting change and maximum impact. Thank you for tuning in this week. I really appreciate it. Please leave a comment below if you have questions about the body, anything that you would like to learn about or discuss regarding the body in a future episode. I am all ears. And don't forget, I am in this with you. And hey, if this episode resonated with you, share it with a friend who might need some encouragement on their health journey too. Let's do this together because the lasting change happens in community. Until next time, let's start to get healthy, stay joyful, and keep climbing those ladders. one small rung at a time. See you next week.