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Winning Daily Practices

Hey Brothers!

Welcome to the LenDentonThrive Letter!

Do you want to build a healthy, sustainable lifestyle that will help you lose weight, get fit, and stay fit for the rest of your life? All without resorting to crazy diets, grueling workouts, or expensive and risky medications? 

Then, this week’s edition of the LenDentonThrive Letter is just for you.

If you’re an Over-50 guy like me, you’re not interested in a short-term approach to fitness. Nope! The better answer is a healthy, sustainable lifestyle.

But, what is a lifestyle? 

We all have a lifestyle, whether it's intentional or not…healthy or not. It's what you do every day.  

When most guys think about building a healthy lifestyle, they think about hard things. Things like lifting jaw-dropping amounts of weight, endless miles of jogging, and eating meal-after-meal of boiled chicken and steamed veggies. 

And, this is completely natural because these are the kinds of ideas that are circulating daily through our media. In America, there’s a very specific warrior mentality edge to fitness, telling us to: “Go hard or stay home!”

But, there’s a smarter, not harder way to achieve lifelong fitness.

That smarter, not harder way is the ThriveLife, which is a customized lifestyle design built on a set of smart daily practices.  These smart daily practices are the building blocks of any healthy lifestyle. Let’s quickly break that down further:

Customized - tuned to the needs and preferences of its creator (you). That means every ThriveLife is slightly different.

Smart - simple and effective

Practice - activities done in the spirit of constant improvement where you are practicing or approximating future success. 

My ThriveLife is now 10 years old, and it has served me well. It initially helped me reduce my weight from a hefty 248 pounds to a fitter and much healthier 176 pounds in just 7 months. And. it’s helped me to stay fit and healthy ever since. 

Over those 10 years, my ThriveLife has evolved as my life has changed, and as I’ve learned more about what I need to stay healthy.

To give you a quick example of what a ThriveLife can look like, I’ll share my ThriveLive with you. It’s built on 6 smart daily practices. That might seem like a lot, but it’s really not. These activities are built into my life so they are practically automatic. 

Here’s the quick tour of my ThriveLife, built on my 6 smart daily practices:

1. Eating Smarter - our nutrition is the single most important aspect of our health and fitness. We can literally change the way we look, the way we feel, and how long we’ll live by changing the way we eat. We can make food work for us, but to do that we must eat intentionally. That means choosing foods that support our health and avoiding foods that can wreck our health. I began by eliminating sugars from the foods I chose, and ate more wholesome foods. I call this Eating Smarter, and I’ve written about this extensively here, here, and here. Change your food, change your life!

2. Daily Meal Planning - I learned early on that it’s easier to avoid calories than to burn them off through exercise. A quick meal planning session in the morning (5 minutes or less) allows me to plan healthy meals and snacks so I don’t get caught later with only bad choices. If I’m meeting a colleague for lunch, I choose a restaurant with healthy options.  If I’m taking an early morning flight, I take my own healthy travel oatmeal for an in-flight snack. Just 5 minutes of planning can save you 500 calories every day. 

3. Weigh-in Ritual - a very smart guy (Peter Drucker) once said: “If you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” He was initially talking about business practices, but it turns out to be almost universally true. It’s especially true for losing weight and getting fit. I do a quick weigh-in every morning and record the weight in my Fitbit app to track it. There is some real mind-magic (neuroscience) behind watching the trends in your weight. See what I mean here. This might be the most important 1 minute of my ThriveLife!

4. Getting My Steps -  exercise is an important element of any fit lifestyle. Walking is my primary form of exercise. In the early days of my ThriveLife, it was my only form of exercise. (Yes, I lost 70+ pounds without running or lifting!) I call this Moving Smarter. This is an area that’s open to custom tuning based on individual preferences. My choice is walking (Zone 2 cardio is a body fat killer!). Yours might be something else. The key is to choose an exercise activity that you can and will do consistently. Learn more about Moving Smarter here, and here.

5. Muscle Building (Training Smarter) - as I learned more about building and maintaining lifelong health, I added muscle building to my daily practices. Maintaining muscle mass is important, especially for Over-50 Guys like me. Sarcopenia, the gradual loss of muscle mass due to aging, is a real issue. Weight lifting and strength training are effective ways to build muscle mass and counter this natural loss. Today, I use bodyweight exercises and barbells to do daily strength training at home. Learn more about Training Smarter here.

6. Sleeping Better - getting more and better sleep is the newest addition to my smart daily practices. Today, it is a work in progress, and my #1 health and fitness goal. In recent years, we’ve learned a lot about the importance of getting at least 7-9 hours of quality sleep every night. Memory, cognition, stress management and even weight loss are affected negatively by poor sleep practices. I spent most of my life operating on 5-6 hours of sleep at night, thinking that was a good thing. Now, I know that sleep is essential to strong daily performance and healthy aging. Today, I’m focused on getting 7 hours of sleep every night. Read more about the importance of sleep here.

Build your better future by building your ThriveLife. Look better, feel better, and live longer. You’re worth it!

Smarter, not harder!

Thanks for stopping by.

Thanks for reading this week.

I write this newsletter to make a positive impact on the lives of Over-50 Guys and their families. If you found this information useful, please consider subscribing to receive new editions each week.

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