A few weeks ago, we talked with the staff about financial planning; if you don’t know, finance plays a significant role on your health, family life, and mental wellbeing.
Money problems can lead to stress at home, leading to increased anxiety, which leads us to increase cortisol which increases hunger cues, and poof, increase weight and blood pressure.
Alas, I am not a financial expert and will not be talking about solving financial stress, though I do love a good Excel spreadsheet.
The phrase “Financial Creep” was one lesson that stuck with me. If you don’t know what financial creep is, it is basically as your income increases, or if you got a bonus check, your expenses magically increase. And you wonder to yourself, “why am I still in the same financially stressed place I was when I was making “X”?”
Health Creep
Health creep happens when you slowly make changes to your life that:
- Increase your caloric consumption (ability to eat out more, switch from Bud Lift to Craft Beer).
- Increase stress (took on a role with more responsibility or added a few kids to your life).
- Increase sedentary (job/life doesn’t require you to move as much, maybe because you outsourced your yard work or your job is less physically demanding and more mentally demanding now).
These little changes add up over time until you wake up one day and say, “Why do I always feel run down?” or “Why are my summer shorts not fitting like they did last summer?”
Well, it’s because it crept up on you.
How To Stop Health Creep
Step one is always awareness.
Usually, what brings awareness when we are unaware is something like not being able to walk upstairs without feeling out of breath or seeing a photo. You ask, “who is that?”
Or going back to clothing, finding you only wash your jeans every four uses because it took you the first two times to get them stretched to the comfort level you like them at, and you can’t keep wairing jeans that haven’t been washed in a week. Something in my life needs to change, and it is for sure not these jeans.
Once you are aware of the creep, next is spotting where the creep is happening.
3 Tools to Spot Creep
- Track your food for 3-7 days
- Use a step counter or track your activity (workouts and walks)
- Tracking your resting heart rate for a week
Need help getting your lifestyle creep back in check? Let’s find a time to chat!
Your Fitness Sherpa,
Coach Josh
