If stopping water messed me up…
My 3 Basic Steps To Getting Back Into Health (Step 1: Water)
It’s easy to fall off the path to health. With these simple steps, it’s easy to get back on.
Earlier this year, I wrote about 5 Simple Exercises That Blasted Away My Lock-down Weight. This was true. I also chronicled how Intermittent Fasting Conquered My Hunger and helped me lose far.
This was also true.
And yet, here we are a few months later, and I’m talking about what happens when you slip up and need to find the path back to your health goals.
How can I be writing about righting the ship now? Because life is a journey, and sometimes you have to make course corrections.
My workout program is still the best path to my fitness needs. Intermittent Fasting is the right lifestyle for me to lose and maintain my weight. Both of these should work for many of you.
But, as I’ve learned, you have to put in the work. And you have to drink the water.
Where did I stumble? I let myself get dehydrated.
I stopped drinking water regularly. I travel for a living and found myself in a hotel and work situation where the water was both terrible and inaccessible. In that order.
Could I have made adjustments? Sure. I could have and should have bought drinking water — lots of it.
Instead, I stopped drinking water except during meals.
Without water, my appetite increased. Before this trip, I’d found myself looking forward to my first glass of water more than my first cup of coffee.
It’s no secret that the human body needs water.
Thirst can also be mistaken for hunger. This is apparently true even when you’ve come to recognize the difference. It certainly rang true for me.
I drank less water. I ate more at meals and eventually ate more often between meals.
I can’t say if this is related to the water, but I also tweaked something in my side and decided to take a few days off my exercise routine. I don’t think it came from my workout, which is designed to minimize injuries. But my exercising aggravated the problem.
Secure in the knowledge that I’d figured out how to overcome bad habits; I settled back into bad habits.
When I returned home, I found we had to get our well water treated. I still don’t completely trust it.
And with those two issues, drinking less water and halting exercise, my two keys to health and fitness diminished.
Soon I was intermittent fasting only intermittently. At best.
I always knew I’d gain some weight back. Fasting allows for that.
But weeks passed, and I stopped doing the work. And then, finally, I recognized a warning sign when the others hadn’t registered.
My newest, smaller size of pants I’d bought grew too tight.
Wake-up call.
Okay. Maybe it wasn’t the pants that grew.
I could take refuge that my other smaller-but-not-quite-as-small-as-the-newest-pairs-of-pants still fit. Or, I could start putting in the work before I grew to my previous obese levels.
Fortunately, I picked the healthy path.
Deciding to get back in shape and then picking a starting point is the hardest part.
After that, I found it’s easy to start back. Here are the steps I took.
- Make a point of drinking water frequently throughout the day. This also means always have drinking water available.
- Ease back into fasting. I wanted to correct things with a week-long fast. Going back to regular 18-hour fasts and building up to OMAD is smarter. So that’s where I am. To make this work, I use a fasting tracker (LIFE Fasting Tracker) to keep track and keep me honest.
- Start back the exercises with less than 10 minutes a day.
That’s it. The hardest part was starting again. But the lifestyle and methods are so easy, it doesn’t take much to begin. Especially when it all started with not drinking water.
To paraphrase Nike, Just Drink It.
I’m not where I was. But boy, do I feel better already with just a few days of the routine.
It’s easy to forget how much healthier and full of energy this lifestyle brings about.
Our success has to be intentional.
No more, I’ll eventually work out. No. Work out. No more, I’ll start fasting back. Probably tomorrow. Nope. Stop eating at a specific time and start the fasting timer. I can eat again tomorrow at 1pm. If I’m hungry.
Success means doing the things that lead to success.
I’ll be completing two weeks of the 18–6 fasting protocol soon. Then I’ll move on to longer fasts.
And I was surprised at how easy it was to jump back into my 5 exercises, even though I’d recently added weight to my kettlebells.
- Drink water.
- Intermittent fast.
- Do my fast five exercises.
- Put in the work.
It works for me, even after restarting bad habits. It can work for you as well.
Scott Hughey would much rather write a fake article about how he never struggled again to stay healthy. The real story, though, he thinks, is more authentic and more helpful.
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