Do you struggle to achieve the ‘healthy lifestyle’ that medical professionals are always espousing? I know, I certainly do. I never seem to have the time to properly balance exercise and sustenance. Sure, ‘eat less and do more sport’ sounds simple enough, but a busy stressful career coupled to an active family life makes it hard to focus on staying healthy.

The younger ‘me’ tended to simply shrug this all off. ‘I’m strong enough to cope.’ was my belief. However, as the years go by, my ‘unhealthy lifestyle’ has begun to take its toll. Job stress leads to comfort eating and chronic fatigue. This in turn leads to weight gain and lack of fitness. These in turn can cause diabetes and increasing blood pressure.

If all this wasn’t bad enough, there comes the creeping feeling of frustration and shame at not being able to follow the simplest of exercise and dietary advice about how to lead a ‘healthy lifestyle’. This increases stress still further and the cycle loops round to reinforce itself in a descending helix.

After many years of reading health advice and success stories, I have reached a conclusion.

Everyone is different and different things work best for different people.

Put simply, I realised that only one person was ever going to be able to tell me what I should be doing to maintain good health, me. But how? I had tried so many things spread out over so many years and had no success.

The answer was disarmingly simply. Instead of blindly attempting to mirror other people’s successes, I had to stop wildly stabbing about in the dark and develop a methodology that works for me. As an engineer and analyst, this idea sounded right. Starting with a ‘first principles’ approach and building something from the ground up would be double fun.

It would certainly be a complex project with lots of moving parts and a limited timescale, but also crucial to improving my all-round quality of life. With this in mind I began planning by creating a list of realistic goals and clear expectations.

In the end, I don’t only want to create something for myself, but also give other people a method by which to design their own tailor made health and wellness plan.

Obviously, it’s still a bit early to present the new and improved super me. I’ve only just started to think about how to begin. However, a small amount of progress has been made. I’ve set out a road map and begun collecting data to form a base line for my climb to health and even at this early stage, I have learnt some really interesting stuff.

The first items of my base line are as follows:

This is by no way everything that I want in the base line. Most importantly, I want to include some sport performance metrics for strength, speed and endurance. However, with many gyms, swimming pools and sport clubs shut down for social distancing right now. I may have to settle for some crude ‘at home’ measurements to begin with. I’ll send an update as soon as I have collected more info.

So what do you think? Let me know how you stay fit and healthy. Also, do you know someone who would like to participate? Spread the word and recruit a few people. The more people that take part, the more valuable the results are going to be for everyone.

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