MOM Welcome

Here are your joining instructions.

At 45 years old, I was somewhat overweight; even though I regularly exercised, it seemed that age and a diminishing metabolism had finally caught up with me.

I had an old knee injury that had prevented me from running for a few years and I had spent the previous year trying to fix it. My GP had told me that I should realise that it’s part of getting old and I should just accept it.

I remember phoning my brother Damien from the car park feeling like I had been kicked in the stomach. He set me on a challenge to get into the very best shape that I could, just to prove the GP wrong.

Damien’s approach is that you don’t need to run for hours to lose weight and become healthier and providing I was willing to eat cleanly and commit to an exercise program, he would help me all he could.

Reason number two was that my wife and I had become a little comfortable in our own skins and had enjoyed life. As with everything, it catches up with you in the end. There is always that one photograph that someone takes of you, and when it is put on social media, you can hardly recognise yourself.

My photo was at a Christmas dinner with all my wife’s family, and I looked like I had eaten myself. I didn’t recognise myself at all. That was a catalyst for me as I had always been in a good athletic shape until now.

The third reason, and probably the most important, was that I wanted to inspire my wife to get healthy with me so that we can extend the amount of time that we have left with each other before the inevitable happens.

You see my wife’s stepfather passed away after only a short battle with cancer, which crippled us all and hit me more than I could have anticipated. He and I had become close friends over the 20+ years that we knew each other, so I couldn’t begin to imagine how my wife and her family felt.

Shortly after his passing, my wife became increasingly ill. We had been down the conventional route of seeing the GP, being referred to the hospital and having several false diagnoses. We finally decided to go private.

You see, there was a massive growth protruding through the stomach muscles, the size of which the specialist said they had never seen before. After a major operation and being bed bound for 3 months, I wanted my wife to make some changes and start a new healthy life after the warning that we had received.

On a positive note, we are all very healthy and we have already seen a huge change in our mindset, how and what we eat and our body shape after also going through regular exercise. We have been using all the tools and techniques in this book, and our hope is that you will also find the contents very useful.

So why a Health house? Well, I’m not a builder by any stretch of the imagination, but I have an understanding of how a house is built. I mean it has to have good foundations, quality bricks and mortar, water tight roof, etc. Most people will have lived in one at some point in their lives and will, therefore, be able to relate to how the book is structured.

The book starts with the Results roof because it is where everything in life appears to commence from these days. I mean we reduce everything into small bite-sized chunks of information, and we expect everything in an instant. We have become impatient because everything is available via the internet and the TV and we received constant streams of information on our smartphones at the touch of a button.

This book will explain why your continual obsession with your weight will only serve to demotivate you and that your outcome will depend on what you choose to focus your energy on. The following chapters will give details on how to stay focused and motivated to ensure that you achieve the shape that you want in your life. Like having a flat, pitched, glass or domed roof that, unless it is water tight, can be open to the elements and become warped.

Water is the one element that will always find the weakest point of the roof and begin the rotting process. Like water, if you allow yourself to be influenced by your external environment, you will consistently make bad choices.

Then we go to the very foundations of our house and, in particular, how we think, although I have referred this section to a pathway leading to the door of your mind. The importance of your beliefs and how they can affect your thoughts, behaviours and ultimately the results you achieve.

The human thought process is not as complex as you may think, and I have simplified it for everyone. I was taught a long time ago that if you can’t explain it to your grandma, then you are over complicating it. The do’s and don’ts of thinking for success, plus how you can take back control of your thoughts and how to make them work for you.

Choices are like the mortar between the building bricks of life that they can either hold everything together or cause things to come crashing down around us. The mistake that most people make is not realising that there is always a choice. You may not like the choice, but there is always one to be had and it is yours alone.

The building blocks of Mindset, Exercise, Nutrition and Sleep are directly influenced by your thoughts and choices that you make on a daily basis. You might be even making them at a subconscious level without even realising. Hopefully, this book will go some way to showing you how to take control back.

What is life without a dream? Dr Martin Luther King said, ‘I have a dream,’ and it started a movement with regards to the civil rights of black people in America. It wouldn’t have been the same if he’d said, ‘I have a goal,’ would it? It is in our DNA as human beings to dream of things we aspire to because if we can dream it, then we can achieve it.

Most innovative inventions have come from the question, ‘Wouldn’t it be good if…’ Virgin Atlantic was born from the need of Richard Branson to charter an aircraft from Los Angeles. It is okay to dream because it allows us to fulfil those basic human needs to constantly evolve – without imagination, we would still be living in caves.

In the second part of the book, you will find a 30-day-detox-your-mind program, with a daily task and thought-provoking questions that I would use if I were coaching you 1-2-1.

Carefully read through the daily task and complete everything in order. If you miss a day, just start from where you left off. You will need to complete the whole program which will include weekends. It doesn’t mean that you only do this Monday to Friday but it does mean that you NEED to complete 30 consecutive days in a row.

Why should you detox your brain? Well, if you have ever wondered why most diets and fitness programs fail, then you will understand what I am about to say. Before you embark on any fitness or eating plan, you must first prepare your mind to make the necessary sacrifices. Get your mindset right first, and everything else will fall into place; get it wrong, and it is like building a house on uneven foundations.

You will find links to our online community as well as useful templates throughout the book but particularly in the appendix. Let’s get started because it’s time to spring-clean your mind.[/text_block]