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Your New Year's Antiaging Resolution: Train Your Inner Pit Bull
The new year is almost here and you may be making a few antiaging resolutions to improve your health or appearance. Perhaps Santa will be giving you a treadmill -- if you are lucky or if you've been very good.
Not too excited about that?
Let me get right to it. If you don't have a treadmill, you should. It's one of the best Christmas gifts you can buy for yourself and your family. A treadmill is your speedway to a healthier cardio-vascular system and weight control. It's my favorite tool to maintain a youthful, energetic stride. If walking is difficult, try a Gazelle. Thirty minutes every day will give you a waistline in no time at all like you haven't had since you were eighteen. When you have your own treadmill or Gazelle you don't need an expensive membership at a fitness club. (I recall telling a doctor I had a Gazelle. She looked at me strangely. She wondered if I might be harboring some kind of illegal animal. Obviously, she doesn't watch TV shopping shows very much.)
Okay, let's say you have a treadmill or will buy one. Your New Year's resolution is to use it every day for 30 minutes. Yaaay!
But here's the reality. Your resolution lasts about 30 days, if that, because life has a way of interrupting. You have something more important to do with your time. You forget. Whatever the reason, your good intention goes in the tank.
I'm not qualified to get into the psychology of why people do or don't do what they know they should do. I don't even care about the psychology because I know this as a certainty: We all have the ability to make choices. And somehow, and you know this is true, we usually, if not always, find a way to do what we really believe is important.
In my new book, "No More Little Old Ladies!" I talk about the necessity of recognizing that within each of us there are two entities that function to influence our lives. You are well aware of one of them -- your survival instinct. I have chosen to call it your inner pit bull because, like a trainable dog, your survival instinct is trainable to a greater extent that you might think.
My inner pit bull is named Rocky. I've mentioned him before. He's the meanest slobbering beast you hope you would never meet in a dark alley. He's tough, and I've trained him to be tough.
I have trained Rocky so well that when I'm tempted to sit and watch TV after dinner, he snarls and tells me to get off my butt unless I want to balloon from a size 10 to a size 20 in short order. Rocky also shows me pictures of what I will look like if I don't walk every day. You may laugh at this, but it works for me. Visualization is very powerful.
The other entity is your existence manager whose purpose is to get you to the end of your life. I'm not sure you can control the number of years you will live, but I do know that from personal experience you can influence how your existence manager affects the quality of your life. Here's a perfect example of an existence manager at work:
A mattress ad currently running on TV shows a young woman in bed and the alarm goes off for an early workout at the gym. An older woman appears beside her, telling her that she should enjoy the great mattress and that the gym will be there tomorrow. This is a perfect example of how your existence manager tries to sabotage your good intentions to stay in shape.
Recognize that you have an existence manager. Know what it looks like and give it a name. My existence manager is Jezebel, a refined, genteel, conniving Southern lady right out of Gone with the Wind, and she and Rocky constantly jockey for control of my mind and body.
When I'm debating about "should I or should I not walk " Jezebel, mint julep sipping temptress that she is, coos into my consciousness, "Barbara sweetie, you've worked hard today. You deserve to sit." Guess what. Rocky is the victor in just about every tug or war with Jezebel.
You could say I walk out of habit. Yes, that's part of it. But habits that require expenditure of energy are easy to break. You have to be tough and determined to win the war against decline that can come with aging. You need an ally, and your best friend can be your inner pit bull that you can train to do your bidding.
I understand that we are all different. Not everyone is as tough as I am, but my toughness is not something I was born with. I worked at creating it. You can do it too.
The bottom line is this: You have the capacity to make choices. If you do nothing else for yourself in the New Year, get a treadmill or use the one you have every day. At the end of the year you will have added years of youthful, ageless zip to your life. You will have more energy and vitality. You may even find that some health issues may disappear. The icing on the cake is that you will loook better than you have in years. All it takes is 30 minutes a day, every day, while you walk through your favorite TV program.
Girlfriend, are you up to it? Sure you are. Get to know your inner pit bull. Get on a first name basis with it. Train it to do what you want it to do. Identify your existence manager and figure out how to deal with it. You will be rewarded beyond anything you can imagine.
Grrrrrr. :-)
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