Investing in your future right now will be your most important investment.
Most want to live a better life, not necessarily a longer life – especially if those years are spent being sick and feeling awful. The catch is that those serious, chronic medical problems that many of us will face in our final few decades were set into motion decades earlier.
And if you are wondering whether you might be on the path toward heart disease, diabetes, cancer or dementia in your future, what you are doing today might provide your answer.
The science is fairly clear
HOW we live our day-to-day lives is the single most important factor in avoiding future chronic diseases rather than just our genes alone. It makes much more sense to prevent that future heart attack or cancer than it does waiting for it to happen and then trying to treat those devastating effects after it hits us.
Apply the most future-facing healthcare data available to drive meaningful change for your lifestyle.
Lifestyle Medicine is change medicine.
If we are what we do repeatedly, we must change what we do repeatedly.
We must believe that we can change. We must want to change. And we must embrace a need for change, or meaningful change will not occur.
Changing a little over time works quite well when we continuously change over a long period of time.
This is where Add+Life steps in.
Finding out what your current state of health is and where it is going doesn’t have to be a mystery. And you don’t have to take the path to wellbeing alone. A wellness coach is an incredible ally for making meaningful change that sticks.
What are we trying to do by becoming healthier?
Are we trying to increase the duration of our lives or are we trying to increase the quality of our lives or maybe a bit of both?
We don’t want to be sick for the rest of our lives. We don’t want to be wracked with pain or debilitated for life, right? It might be nice to enjoy the days we spend here on this rock. Those times we spend really alive we will call “moments” for ease of terms. Sign me up – I want more of those!
Moments by definition only last a short while, but they can stay with us forever. Think about a moment that changed your life…a fork in the road so to speak. Now put together a string of those and you plot the course of your life, from the time you were a baby to this very moment right now. A life is made up of moments – we will choose to focus on the good and great moments, but the bad moments also help to define whom we have become. With that said, I choose to use a combination of
moments that drive me forward, from my most amazing moments to the mistakes I made, which often drove me to become a better me.
More moments, more “Life”? Maybe. We choose to think so.
So at Add+Life, we are about adding moments to our lives that make us who we are. And a better version of us is what we have chosen to become – more vigorous, more loving, more empathetic, more engaged, more alive. We want not only more time but a more enjoyable and well-lived time. We want more moments.
So when we talk about making change, we talk about adding “Moments”, because the changes we make must be made routinely for those small changes to add up to more life. For our purposes then, when we add something to our daily routine which increases health and wellness, we call that a moment added.
How do you add more moments to your life? Make change.
What is our process?
How many moments are enough? Who knows? But 2 doesn’t seem like it’s going to do, right? So our goal is to have you determine how much is enough? Add 5 moments this month? 6? 7?
People do not make changes easily. We need the opportunity to find a way to move away from processes that are harming us and add processes which create better, longer, more fulfilling lives. That takes time and the input of energy. And a lot of times we only have so much energy to give. Many people can add 2-4 moments of change weekly and we recommend that this is where you create your patterns that lead to longer life.
Since we are focused on increasing the duration of life by years let’s hope, we necessarily can’t be in a huge hurry to get where we are going. Change takes time, as well as effort, to see results. Adding for example 2 moments of change per day per week might catalyze a change in your muscles that you start to see benefits from weeks later, so don’t get in a hurry. Adding together two, then three, then four moments of change will eventually add up to real change over time.
This change revolution must be consistent and progressive to have long term effects but we also want to see benefit fairly quickly as well. So we are going to need to build on each chunk of moments every 2-4 weeks to see some results in how we feel and function. But when we do add moments in chunks, now we are talking about taking our bodies in a whole new direction.
There is almost no moment in our lives when change can help our bodies improve itself. We are literally self-healing biological machines. Now I do say almost because we all know that it can become too late -so don’t let it become “Too late”.
Research shows us that the people can create the fastest gains in their muscle mass and strength when they are out of shape and begin a routine exercise regimen in essence, those people who need to improve their bodies the most, get the most benefit from making a change for themselves.