It’s your health, get your priorities straight!

Over the weekend one of our gym’s members, and a colleague in the health and fitness industry, had a great post on her personal Facebook page that quickly addressed how people complain about how expensive it is to eat healthy and that it’s just not affordable for them to live a healthy lifestyle. I’ve been stewing about this for the past 5 days and the more I think about it, the more it pisses me off. When people say things like this I honestly want to scream at them. And here’s the Coles Notes version why…

1 bag of Lays Chips costs $3.99 and is usually consumed in one sitting of snacking. That’s 280 calories, 18g of fat and 330mg of sodium. 1 bag of Granny Smith Green Apples costs $4.99 and even if you eat two apples a day, the bag will last you a week. 2 apples are 100 calories, 0.4g of fat and 2mg of sodium. Grapes are $2.99-$3.99 a pound! That means you can buy a pound of grapes for the same price as a bag of chips. Both great snacking foods and both more bang for your buck financially and nutritionally than a bag of chips. This is one very simple example.

Factory-made processed garbage is killing us! What you should be looking for is fresh extra lean or lean ground beef/turkey/chicken, chicken breasts, boneless skinless chicken thighs, roast beef, most types of pork and fish. Every grocery store, every week, has some sort of fresh meat on sale. Pick up a flyer and see what’s on sale and then plan your cooking around what you have.

Don’t have time to cook? Bullshit! I work 12-14 hours a day, 6 days a week and I cook 95% of our meals in our house. Invest in a slow cooker or two (I have three!), learn some recipes (Google or better yet, look under my recipes page on here), and then cook your food overnight so it’s ready to go in the morning. Preparing your meals in bulk will save your time and energy, and you will always have food ready for you when you need it.

“I don’t have the time or money to spend at the gym”. You don’t? How much is your cable every month? How much time do you spend in front of the stupid boob tube last night? How much did you spend at that restaurant at lunch or for supper Friday? You went to the bar on Saturday night? How much did that cost you? $100? $200? And how did you feel the next day? So let me get this straight, you’ll spend $150 at the bar, punishing your body, hurting your liver, adding unhealthy and unneeded calories, consuming garbage and you do this every Saturday, but you won’t spend $100 a month for a gym membership to live a better and longer life? Makes perfect sense to me! Oh wait, nope, that’s pretty much the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard!

These are three very quick and very simple examples, but I hope they opened your eyes a bit. I’ve lived both a very unhealthy and very healthy lifestyle, and please believe and trust me when I say this, I wish I hadn’t spent my early 20s as an overweight and obese man. The only benefit that came from it is that I can share my experiences and help others today because of what I went through. But remember this, you don’t have to go through what I did. You can change your life or even better, prevent it from becoming something that you will regret down the road.