Eating, Moving and Sleeping

Eat less. Move more. Reduce your stress and stop smoking. I've said quite a bit lately about how health and wellness is related to more than these four bedrock components of most wellness programs. Even so, there's plenty of evidence to suggest our behavioral and relational health might have just as much, if not more, influence on our overall health and well-being than just these four. 

That being said, I don't want to give the impression these four aren't important. On the contrary, one of the first things mental health professionals ask a person on intake are questions about changes in diet, weight and sleeping patterns. These things do matter because the body and mind are very close neighbors.

That's one of the reasons I found Eat Move Sleep by Tom Rath so intriguing and helpful. Tom is a #1 New York Times bestselling author (See Strengths Finder 2.0), who does an masterful job of bringing together some of the best research available on each of these three areas. A book like this could be dull as dust to read, but Tom actually takes one idea for each of these areas and compiles them into 30 short chapters. It's the kind of thing you can easily read one chapter a day for a month. Even if you choose to do just a few of the things Tom suggests, you'll definitely be taking a step forward health wise.

With so many self-help, self-improvement books on the market, what would make Tom's worth the read. The research, of course, is compelling. I mean, Tom just didn't make this stuff up. He did his homework. But there's more. From the very beginning of the book, you learn that Tom was diagnosed with a life-threatening cancer at age 16 that causes tumors to grow throughout his body. Over the last two decades he's focused much of his attention to learning what he could do to decrease the odds of his cancer growing and spreading, namely lifestyle changes. Eat Move Sleep is the compilation of this work. Here's how he expresses it in the book:

"I'm a living testament to the fact that lousy predispositions can be encoded in your genes. Yet even in this extreme case, my decisions affect the odds of new tumors growing and my existing cancers spreading. The reality is, the majority of your risk in life lies in the choices you make, not in your family tree." 

He goes on to say, "No single act can prevent cancer or guarantee you will live a long life. Anyone who promises you something that absolute is a fraud." What he shares in the book are some of the "most practical ideas to improve your odds of a longer, healthier, and more fulfilling life."

Two weeks ago I wrote about how insight isn't necessary for change. Being willing to do something different, to be uncomfortable is. This is sort of part two of that posting. If you need to change -- lower your blood pressure, become more active, lose some weight or get better rest -- I urge you to get this book. It won't give you a lot of insight as to why you've come to favor web surfing over walking, vegging out over veggies with hummus, or late nights over early bedtimes. It will give you lots of little ideas to develop better health habits today.

And one more thing. I like the fact that Tom gives you 30 days of ideas. Most of us need to do something that long for it to become routine. Then we don't have to ask, "How did I get this way?" It just becomes a new routine.