Taking Wellness One Step at a Time Will Lead to Better Results

The following is adapted from Unstoppable.

Whether you realize it or not, you embark on a health and wellness journey with each new day. From the moment you open your eyes in the morning until you go to sleep at night, you’re making decisions that have the potential to positively or negatively impact your quality of life. That’s why what you eat, drink, and think, as well as how you move your body (or not) plays a pivotal role in your journey to health and wellness. Make the right decisions about these things consistently, and more than likely, you’ll lead a healthy life. Make the wrong ones and you could suffer serious setbacks on your journey.

Now, I’m not saying all of this to scare you. On the contrary: I say this to empower you. That’s because the right decisions have the potential to serve as entry points into the lives we want to lead, the way we want our bodies to look, and how we want to feel.

But here’s the thing: being healthy is hard work. It means making the right decisions from the time we wake up until we go to sleep at night. Being sick, on the other hand—well, that’s easy. It requires no change in behavior and eliminates the need to make the right decisions all the time about the food you eat or how you treat your body. You can do as you please and take advantage of all that life has to offer.

That is, until you physically can’t.

There’s a better way to go about your wellness journey. Where typical diets and regimens might bog you down with nagging insecurity and doubt, I can show you a way to wellness that will leave you feeling free, secure, and satisfied. 

Viewing Decision-Making Differently

As someone who has struggled with diet, exercise, and health for most of my life, I can attest: being sick was incredibly easy—at first. But over time, being sick held me back from truly taking advantage of all that life has to offer. The decisions I made about what I put in my body and how I moved it started to have massively negative consequences. When my body started to shut down, that’s when I started to view decision-making differently.

Instead of obstacles to my happiness, I started to view decisions as small units of potential change—units that, when broken down, could be optimized.

Here’s a quick, if oversimplified, example: when confronted with the right food or the wrong food for my body, I could make the decision to go with the food that would give me energy and clear my mind, or I could go with the lesser option. When I changed the way I viewed decision-making, I started to look at scenarios like this one as moments to optimize life starting on a much smaller scale. But when added up, I discovered that all those smaller optimizations translated into tremendous gains in health and wellness.

Makes sense, right? I think so.

But, strangely, our performance-driven and success-obsessed culture tends to overlook this approach to health and wellness. Few people have considered what it means to optimize their time, energy, and resources to lead richer, fuller, healthier lives simply by optimizing their decision-making process. Though every individual is on their own health journey simply by being alive, many haven’t been intentional about choosing their destination. 

As an entrepreneur over the last fifteen years, I’ve seen very ambitious, professionally minded individuals go about making optimizations in their businesses, in their schedules, and for their employees, but completely overlook making optimizations to body and mind. This has always surprised me, but it also makes clear how even the most driven among us don’t think about optimizing things like sleep, exercise, and diet the way we do many other things in our lives.

The Myths We Hold Dear

Instead, I’ve found that most people who are interested in embarking on their own health and wellness journey are guided by myths that emerge from the pseudoscientific information popularized in the media. As a result, many people think health revolves around counting calories and steps, doing daily cardio exercise, lowering cholesterol, eating low-fat foods, and the like. Though common, accepting this information as truth is dangerous in many ways.

That’s because much of this information is rooted in faulty science, or shared by brands or spokespeople that have been paid to endorse products. When these products and methodologies don’t work as promised, they’re understandably frustrated and disappointed.

This reflects my journey to health and wellness, too.

Throughout my twenties and early thirties, I believed in the popular health narratives that seemed to come and go with each passing year:

Burn more calories than you take in and you’ll lose weight.

Avoid high-fat foods and you’ll keep cholesterol in a healthy range.

Do cardio every day.

These are just some of the health mantras I repeated to myself while I struggled with my weight, and they dictated my approach to fitness and health. If I felt low on energy, I vowed to do more cardio. When my doctor said my cholesterol was high, I eliminated fatty foods from my diet. But none of it worked. The symptoms always continued, no matter how strict I was with myself. Frustratingly, during this time, popular pseudoscience provided zero answers for why I felt the way I did.

Once I decided to take matters into my own hands, I started to question everything I’d been led to believe was true about diet, health, medicine, and more. I spent ridiculous amounts of time, money, and energy exploring those areas in an effort to optimize my own life, body, and mind.

Embrace the Journey

It’s possible to find strategies that can help you optimize your life. Just remember that change happens in increments. All those tiny decisions you make every day—about what to eat, how to move, how to live—add up to large-scale changes. Focus on what I call “magic moments,” or the times when you really start to see the sum of good decision-making in everyday life. For me, those magical moments were things like losing and keeping weight off, finally feeling comfortable taking my shirt off in yoga, and not feeling hungry all the time. 

Most people are way too hard on themselves. Most judge themselves harshly for their lives, bodies, and the choices they make that involve them. I understand how hard this is. Over the years, I’ve felt insecure, self-conscious, and ashamed of my own shortcomings. I’ve felt like I wasn’t doing enough, not limiting myself enough, and it put me in a bad place. I know it can be tough to imagine how to get from where you are today to where you want to be tomorrow. But I’m here to tell you that change is possible if you enter into this journey with your eyes wide open, and with real intention. Every decision is an opportunity for optimization, not judgment.

Computer scientist Alan Keys probably said it best: “Our ability to open the future will depend not on how well we learn but how well we are able to unlearn.” This journey will require a lot of unlearning of thinking and behaviors that feel familiar and “right.” It’ll be hard. But, in the end, you only have one life, one body, and one mind. Imagine what it would look like to make the most of them?

For more advice on taking your own wellness journey, you can find Unstoppable on Amazon.

David Hauser is a serial entrepreneur who launched several companies before he began high school. David spent his youth working more than one hundred hours a week, until he realized the toll it was taking on his mind, body, and life. After failing to see results from conventional wisdom, he decided to do what he does best: innovate. His unique journey to wellness has helped him realize his life’s purpose of empowering others to optimize their own lives by reclaiming their health. As David continues to evolve, he receives tremendous support from his partner, Dawn, and their three inspiring children.