Improve Your Health to Enjoy Your Wealth

What good is being successful in your business if you have such poor health you cannot enjoy it?  I know it is hard to get the adequate sleep we need when building a business.  It is difficult to treat exercise as a necessity as compared to researching the best keywords for your Google AdWords campaign.  You see immediate need in what you are doing right now, yet ignore the things you need to do (not just want to do) to stay healthy for yourself, your business, and your family.

You sat down when you first started on your journey into your business development and grabbed a few sheets of paper and started writing down your goals.  Why?  Because your coach and mentor told you to do it.  And now, after several months of action, writing blogs, tweeting followers, updating AdWords, producing videos, direct mailing, and a million other things that made you successful, you need to take out another sheet of paper and start writing down the goals you need to improve your health to enjoy your wealth.  Why?  Because I am your coach and I am telling you to do it.

1.  Get adequate, consistent sleep. During sleep, muscles are repaired due to increased blood supply. Growth hormones are at their peak in deep sleep, aiding in the repair of tissue and allowing for tissue growth.  Immune response is increased as well.  Most importantly for all you business owners, deep REM sleep is when short term memory is transferred to long term memory.  Now we know why we cannot remember that important prospect's name.

2.  Exercise 3-6 hours before sleep and do not eat or drink alcohol at least 2 hours before sleep.  Exercise aides in preparing your body for general maintenance during sleep, but all those sleep benefits above are interrupted if your body has to take resources to digest and process food and alcohol.

3.  Find a daily activity to reduce stress for at least 30 minutes.  This could be exercise, playing with your kids, meditation, reading a book or magazine (no news), engaging in a hobby that does not reward you financially, an so on.  Increased stress increases the level of cortisol, which breaks down muscle tissue into its amino acids, which in turn gets turned to fat when processed through your liver.  Increased stress increases your fat level, and that is bad overall for your heart and other major organs.

4.  Exercise daily.  I am going against the conventional wisdom here, but the standard 3 days of exercise per week is not optimal. Now don't crank out the weights every day, but daily exercise builds a healthy lifestyle habit.  There should be a balance including all aspects of fitness: strength, endurance, cardiovascular, flexibility, and core stability.   Alternate these elements to make your workouts different and more enjoyable, plus your body responds best to change in exercise. Remember that 15 minutes to 30 minutes is all you need.

5.  If you are a meat eater, like me, avoid meat one day every week and double up on your greens.  This will help your body to remove harmful toxins from your cells and flush waste.

6.  Eat 6-8 small meals per day.  Forget the words "breakfast", "lunch", and "dinner"; they do not exist any longer.  Your body starts to complain about lack of fuel after 2 hours.  Then it panics and turns whatever you give it into fat since it does not know when the next meal is going to come.

Understanding what your body NEEDS will help you maximize your fitness efforts while not hindering you in the operation of your business.  Wealth is simply not as important as good mental and physical fitness.  Improve your health to enjoy your wealth or lose both.