Forget Diets: A 90-Day Journey to Transform Your Body & Soul

Working out is hard. Getting motivated to start a healthy journey is even more challenging. Not only is society against you, with lifestyle stress, peer pressure, body shaming, crash dieting schemes, and pills. Your physical, mental, and emotional health status, genetics, hormones, and finances can be significant barriers to getting healthy. It is as if American society and culture are systemically setting us up for us to fail and keep us in bondage to obesity and health issues to benefit the healthcare system. In some communities, within a five-mile radius, there can be five or more fast food chains, pharmacies, walk-in clinics, and barely a grocery store or farmer’s market in sight where people can access fresh food. 

And so, what can we do to establish at least some control over our healthcare? We start small by consistently working out, keeping ourselves hydrated, and intermittently fast. In the next 90 days, I invite anyone to join me in completing these three simple steps to start taking charge of your life, health, and joy. 

Forget the crash diets and unrealistic expectations. Weight loss will not be an outcome we will strive for in the next 90 days. The plan is to be disciplined, consistent, and compassionate as we implement the following actions steps in our everyday lives:

Move Your Body

Walk 3-5 miles each day. If you are starting out, keep it as low impact as you want, or you can decide to take a jog or run to reach the 3-5 miles goal, but make sure you achieve that goal every day. Here are some tips that you can use to get to at least the 3-mile milestone. 1) Take a brief one-mile walk in the morning, lunchtime, and evening. 2) Break the three miles into two sets of 1.5 miles each day, or if you only have an hour to work during the day, do it all at once. 3) Walk around your house while you are scrolling social media. Get moving, and only go to sleep with at least getting to the 3 miles. 

Stay Hydrated

Drink at least 64 ounces of water each day. Water is life. 45 to 75% of our body is made up of water, and often, we do ourselves a disservice by not keeping hydrated. Dehydration makes you sick. It weakens the immune system and increases obesity and gastrointestinal issues, such as constipation, bloatedness, fatigue, etc. I recently learned how dehydration impacted my body, and I implore you to keep yourself hydrated. I am not talking about soda. Water. Herbal tea, lemon-flavored water. But seriously, water, water, water. It is one of the best ways to remove built-up toxins and wastes from your body and keep you moving forward physically, mentally, and emotionally. Who knew the fountain of youth and health was simply water! 

Intermittent Fasting

12-hour, 14-hour, 16-hour, 18-hour regular fast. There are many different types of regular fast that you can implement in your health journey. A 12-hour fast might be the best way to start if you are just starting out. This is where you eat within a 12-hour window and fast for the remainder of 12 hours. The plan is to give your body a break to process the food you’ve eaten and restart your system. Just like water, there are a lot of positive health benefits that come with fasting, from controlling blood sugar, fighting against inflammation, and enhancing health and mood. At this point in time, there are no dietary restrictions during your eating period; pick a fast and go with it. 

90-Days to A New You

That’s it! That’s the 90-day plan. If you incorporate these small changes in your life daily, you will start feeling better about your physical health, and your mood and attitude toward yourself will change. You will create a healthy habit that will have a lasting impact on your life. 

Two Simple Steps to Achieving Success

To ensure you succeed in this process, please do the following things. The first is to invite God and ask him for the strength that you need. I believed I could do this independently but quickly realized I needed God’s strength and discipline to keep me focused and motivated.

Proverbs 3 verses 6 reminds us, “In everything you do, put God first, and he will direct you and crown your efforts with success.” 

So, Lord, we thank you for everyone who is reading this post and feels a need to implement these small steps into their everyday life. Please guide their path. Please give us the motivation, discipline, and health we need to care for our body and health. We pray for you in the name of Jesus. Amen. 

The next thing I ask you is to keep a sheet of paper with the three activities in a visible place where you can see it daily. In addition to the three action items that you will take, in each line, write Day 1 to Day 90; you might need multiple sheets of paper, but start with one and get to as many days as possible.

Each day before you go to bed, mark off what you accomplished for the day. For example, I started eating at_____, walked ____ miles, drank ___oz of water, and started fasting at ____. I wouldn’t recommend an app or a spreadsheet for this exercise, although you can use one. The physical act of taking a pen/pencil to paper to write out what you did and to put a checkmark on the days you’ve met your goals can make you feel happy about that achievement. 

My last suggestion as you go through this journey is to give yourself grace and have compassion for yourself. This is challenging work. There will be days when your whole body aches. There will be days or weeks when you are so tired, stressed out, or emotionally worn out that all you want to do is go to sleep, crash in front of your television, or scroll through your phone.

Give yourself the grace to fail and learn in this journey. The grace to truly take care of yourself is essential. In those moments of weakness, be reminded that God is in it with you and will not allow you to take on more than you can bear, for through Him, you can do everything. Let’s do it!