Get healthy.
It’s a gazillion-dollar industry. Gym memberships. Diet books.
As I listen to folks talk about how hard exercising, water consumption and getting sh*t done-ness is, I think about what being a healthy person really means.
For me, as someone who spent most of my life as an unhealthy person, learning how to become a healthy person remains quite a journey.
It started with understanding the foundation of health.
I know several fitness buffs who eat right and have abs of steel like something out of the movies. But they are unhealthy in other areas – i.e. stay in abusive relationships or live in constant anxiety.
Every truly healthy person I’ve met has solid understanding and use of the fundamental element of being healthy: The fact that taking good care of yourself is your only job in life.
When you have this embedded in your brain, all of facets of healthy living are MUCH easier.
Seems easy.
But it’s not for some of us, including people who lived in dysfunctional environments.
Why is being a healthy person difficult for adult children of alcoholics?
I spent my entire childhood and teenage years being a miniature adult, instead of a kid. I had to be the grownup because my alcoholic mother and my codependent father were too ill to keep everything together.
So I learned to live unhealthily. It wasn’t until I hit rock bottom and got help in desperation that I realized that I am normal and I only have one responsibility in this life: to take good care of me.
I grew up tossing aside my own needs to help other people.
The people who have this figured out and LIVE aligned with this guiding question are often the very best givers.
It’s the same reason you board an airplane and they tell you that if the plane goes down, put your own oxygen mask on before you help the people around you.
When you’re not a healthy person, you can’t properly help other people.
When my mother’s drinking was at its worst, I couldn’t get through a day without sick-to-my-stomach worry. With that kind of obsession, and non-living, how could I think clearly and freely enough to be healthy? I hardly slept. I skipped meals. I ate fast food. I did nothing but work, take care of my sister and clean up the figurative and literal messes that my mother made because of her alcohol use disorder.
I ask myself this question almost every day: Is this good for YOU?
When the answer is no, I must do something that feels wrong: I have to say no to people and to doing or not doing things.
Being healthy is not easy but it is much easier when you have a guiding, powerful question.
I hope you are well in your journey.
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Jody Lamb is an author, blogger and adult child of an alcoholic on a journey to create an awesome grownup life. Visit JodyLamb.com. Twitter and Instagram: @JodyMLamb. YouTube: /JodyLamb. Facebook.com/JodyLambAuthor.
