Health & Fitness Investment Costs

Do you see your health and fitness as a short term or long term investment?

MINDSET


  • How do you see your health and fitness

  • Are you prepared to investment long term

  • Short term investments are risky

Investing for the long term

The Compound Effect

Compound interest is interest on interest…To put another way, you’re getting paid interest on money you didn’t invest in the first place. #winning

In this video I ask you to reflect on how you see your own health and fitness. It’s just a coincidence that I was wearing a training top with “invest smart” on it…

The same concept applies to health and fitness. Imagine your body, health & fitness is the starting amount of money, the pot of gold. You have two investment options

1. Short Term Investment (dieting)

You could decide that you were going on a diet, which is the equivalent of putting all your money in one investment and hoping the short term return is good. It’s risky, though, as it’s not likely to work out long term and you could even be worse off in the short term.

You’re looking for a return (losing weight, adding muscle, etc) gain on the investment (time, energy, research, etc). The trouble with this approach is that unless you know exactly what you are doing it’s likely to go wrong.

2. Long Term Investment

This investment requires you to only invest a little time and effort each week, making small changes. You don’t have the potential for radical change quickly, but over the weeks the changes accumulate and the compounding effect results in lasting, big changes.

What Should you do…?

Most people invest in option 1. It’s a quick fix approach. There are people for who it works, but for the majority it doesn’t. And trying to recover yourself after that bad investment is difficult. Your motivation levels drop, you think you’ve failed and you feel bad about yourself.

Investment option 2 seems less appealing because of the time it takes to get the results. There are no big promises like

If you’ve spent the last X number of years being sedentary and putting on weight, do you think it’s realistic to expect it to come off in a few weeks? Your lifestyle must change to make a sustainable change. Option 2 is safest and most effective way to achieve this change.

Don’t Believe the Hype

Anyone selling you a product will hype up their programme and say that it is amazing. Out of the people trying it some will have great results while others will not. There is no one size fits all approach.

The long term investment strategy works for everyone, because it’s about making simple, small but consistent changes to your lifestyle in order to improve it. That could be reducing sugar and processed foods and adding in walking or a little exercise. It really does depend on what your goals are.