Each week I will elaborate on one of seven steps that I have taken to begin transforming myself into the healthy and fit person that I want to be. Click here to view the 7 steps (Havi’s 7).
Step 2: Educate yourself on yourself
The problem many of us face when making the decision to get healthy is that we don't know what to do. We know we need to exercise and eat better, but what exactly does that mean. Television, print media, and the internet are flooded with all sorts of diet and fitness plans but it's hard to determine which ones actually work and more importantly which ones will work best for you. The following is a list of resources to help get you started in determining what's going to work best for you. If you're reading this and you know of a great resource that has helped you out, feel free to post it in the comments (just remember that we're educating, not selling and I will delete comments I feel cross that line).
Before we get to the list, know that your best resource isn't listed below. The best thing you can do when starting out is to seek the advice of your physician. Using your history and current health, they'll be able give you specific advice where as most everything else you'll find is more general.
Mayo Clinic
This is an awesome website to learn nearly anything and everything you want to know about getting and living healthy. Seriously, the amount of information on this site is astounding. Whenever I’m curious about anything related to my health I know I can find it here. Just take a minute, click the link, and play around; you’ll see what I mean.
Web MD BMI Plus Calculator
This is a great tool and I mentioned it in my last post. It’ll have you input some information about yourself and will compute your BMI as well as show you what a healthy weight and BMI would be for a person of your age, height, and gender. It will also educate you on what BMI is and other attributes such as target heart rate.
NY Times article on Interval Training
If you haven’t heard of interval training it’s one of the more efficient ways to burn calories when working out. This is a pretty good article that will explain it for you. The idea behind posting this link is that you should search out ways to best maximize the time you have to exercise. For me, this means participating in interval training via Insanity. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it will work for you, but the point I’m trying to make is you should spend a little time researching different workout programs using quality sources.
Twitter
Many people have the impression that Twitter is just full of egotistical people posting everything they do throughout the day so that they can feel important. While that can be true at times, Twitter is also an awesome resource to gain updated information on topics that are important to you and this includes health and fitness. The following is a list of people or groups that I like to follow to increase my knowledge about health and fitness (their link followed by their profile info):
http://twitter.com/#!/DaveZinczenko - Editor-in-Chief, Men's Health & Women's Health; author of Abs Diet and Eat This, Not That! series and Today Show contributor.
http://twitter.com/#!/TIMEHealthland - Visit TIME Healthland for expansive coverage of all things health & wellness including breaking news & medical research, diet & fitness, love & family and more
http://twitter.com/#!/WSJHealth - Health news coverage from the Wall Street Journal
http://twitter.com/#!/MensHealthMag - Men's Health magazine is your ultimate guide to fitness, health, weight loss, nutrition, sex, style and guy wisdom. (this is one of my favorites as they’ll tweet a few great articles each day)
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