PRIORITIES.

What are your priorities? We are all so busy, but yet, there are 24 hours in a day. Eight of those you are working and eight of them you are sleeping, so what are we all doing with our remaining 8 hours of the day? When it was explained to me in that form, it really made me think, what am I doing with my remaining 8 hours of my day?

I’m not saying that we don’t live busy lives, but when it is broke down into three different 8-hour segments, it really puts things into perspective. You can do a lot in eight hours. So what is consuming your second set of 8 hours? It is all about perspective and what you choose to make your priority. Tough love, but we all have time in the day to get a workout in every day, even if it is just a quick 30-minute HIIT workout. Convenient fast food or a healthy food choice, meal prep or eating out, we do have time to meal prep, or choose a nutrition system that makes meal prep extremely convenient, whatever works best for you, we have time.

One of the biggest limitations when I am talking with people is that eating healthy is expensive and time consuming. Yeah, it would be awesome if all healthy food could come off the dollar menu, but it just doesn’t. So you choose, dollar menu meals and feel tired all of the time, gain weight, and down the road always be on medication to deal with your health issues- OR buy healthy food now, have energy, feel your best, and avoid medication costs that can be prevented by eating a clean diet. It is sometimes hard for me to understand when people choose processed choices because of cost issues, but yet they will spend money on a weekend away, or for women, spending money on our hair, or buying new clothes and shoes. Don’t get me wrong, my husband and I love to do little weekend getaways, and I sure do love my Lululemon, but we do not let that take away from our healthy eating choices. There is nothing wrong with spending money on those things, but then don’t say you do not have enough money to cook healthy meals, or to buy fresh produce for a meal, versus buying a frozen pizza. That just falls into a matter of priority, I know that is kind of harsh, but if you are spending money on other non-essential things, but yet say you can’t afford to eat healthy, what you are really saying is that your health is not a priority. I’m not saying it is easy to spend money on food, groceries are a hard thing to spend money on, but we can also switch our mindset and look at it as an opportunity to nourish our bodies and be creative. So are you going to choose to make your health a priority, or just push it to the side?

Everyone has their own opinions, which is awesome, and this is just my personal opinion, but the number of times in a day I hear, or see on social media, or talk to people at the gym, the average person is not happy with their weight, or they are feeling so run down and tired. So it is just one of those reality checks that people need to have with themselves, if you have a goal of reaching a certain weight, or to make it through the day without a nap and feeling sluggish, then what are you doing to make that a priority? Are you making any changes? Are you making more excuses, and not really digging deep and really asking yourself the hard questions of what is a priority in your life? We need to do this in our lives in order to really have a drive for WHY we are doing something. If there is no drive and no tough questions being asked, what is it going to do? Realistically, probably nothing, but we need to ask those hard questions and really have that emotion behind WHY we are trying to reach a certain goal, or a certain lifestyle.

We need to take ownership for our choices and for our lives; no one else is making that happen in our lives, we are doing it to ourselves. Change your perspective, shift your mindset, turn your energy into positive energy instead of looking for the negative and all of the things that aren’t going the way we want them to in our life.

I don’t mean to sound harsh, or make it appear that I have my life all in order, because these are DEFINITELY things that I am working on every single day. No one is perfect, and not one of our stories is the same, but we all have a choice on the energy of our stories. We certainly can’t plan it all out or expect to go according to our plan, but we can choose the ENERGY that we put in and give off with our life and our stories! It is up to us to make it happen, no one else is to blame or to take responsibility for our feeling of freedom and positive energy.

Mara, xoxo