Your Social Circle|Health and Wellness Website|Train Well, Eat Well, Live Well

They say that we are the average of the five people we spend most of our time around. The first time I heard this, I took a long, hard look at my life and immediately starting making some adjustments in my social circle. Though I may have been doing well in the primary pillars of life (professional fulfillment, romantic and other friendships, home life), there were some people who had to go. Why? It’s very simple. Though we may feel we have many commonalities with our friends, we still look at ourselves as unique people with our own thoughts, philosophies and ways of life. So what if one of our friends is a complainer, if one is a philanderer, if one is a gossip, if one is passive-aggressive. They’re still our friends with great qualities and you need to be loyal to your friends, right?

Not necessarily. For you see, our judgment may not always be the best. And I’m not just talking about crazy things like wars, famine, adjustable rate mortgages and those outfits we wore last decade as signs that humans make bad decisions. We create relationships based on convenience and logistics, we stay in them because of weakness and its evil cousin laziness, we sell ourselves short as we settle to avoid being lonely and change.

Lets go through just some of the characters:

The ‘friend until you meet someone else’ - We all know someone like this. You have a fun pal you go through all sorts of adventures with. When you bring new people into the group they’re suddenly guarded, defensive and even standoffish.
The chronic ‘woe is me’ victim – Does the drama ever stop with this person? Everyday something is wrong it seems whether it’s with their work, their spouse or the coffee shop cashier. Funny thing is, most of the complaints seem quite like, well, non-issues to you.
The ‘loose as goose’ lack of morals character – This person may like preaching to you on how you should live, but yet is the same one that will take indiscretions. Repeatedly. They will lie, cheat and steal.
The ‘supportive until it conflicts with what they want’ person - They may be all gung-ho about your new fitness regimen, until it starts getting in the way of their social plans and want you to sacrifice.

So what are some of the pitfalls you may have by letting some of these characters revolve around your inner circle just a bit too long?

A. You are stuck in your same social rut. Anytime you are around them doing the same thing you always do with them, is a moment of your life that you were not free to meet newer, more positive people.

B. If these people have flaws serious enough that others see right through them, all the while as you continue to overlook them, you may be turning off new people who float through your life who might have enriched it. Imagine that, people who might have been the bridge to connecting you with a better job, meaningful friends, romance and whatnot, all turned off because of the jerk (male or female) that you’ve learned to tolerate.

C. You have been so motivated all week in keeping up with your routine, but at the constant urging of this friend you go drinking and one becomes two, two become five, and next thing you know you haven’t worked out for 4 days as you recover eating pizza and ice cream on your couch.

Look, differing degrees of individual motivation aside, we are partly creatures of habit and surroundings. Hang out with drug abusers long enough, and your perspective on how one lives will be shifted as the ‘soft’ drugs you once thought were innocent start seeping into your life. Hang with workaholics long enough and you may make great professional connections but will see other aspects of your life dissipate.

The motto of this site is ‘Train Well, Eat Well, Live Well.’ One of the easiest ways to do this is to simply surround yourself around the people who live this life. One of the best ‘kick-in-the-pants’ I ever got was when I started hanging around with a roommate of mine, maybe 6 years back, who was an amateur bodybuilder. I was only a hobby lifter, but his group of friends really showed me the lifestyle commitment necessary to succeed at their level. How?

1. Every two or three hours we would stop what we were doing and eat a healthy meal/supplement. If we went to the movies, we would bring our own protein bars and/or shakes.

2. LA has plenty of nightspots, and though we would go indulge, we would drink water all night. Funny thing is, sometimes I think we had even more fun than the people who were getting sick having too much alcohol.

3. Every night we would have a clear idea of what our workout routine was going to be for the next day, and what time we would need to go to bed by to get our eight hours.

4. Never once did I hear anyone in the group crave pizza or beer or chicken wings, etc. When you eat healthy for a while, your tastes change and you simply don’t WANT the junk food.

Honestly, unless you’re a professional bodybuilder/fitness model, you’re not going to have the lifestyle where you can be perfect with all this. I know I’m not. Corporate meetings at the office aren’t very conducive for a ‘Hey guys, it’s time for my 11am protein shake, be back in 10 minutes’ type of looseness.

The point is though, training well, eating well and living well all take work and are not that easy. They become MUCH easier as time goes by when this is no longer an errand or something on the ‘to-do’ list, but rather a lifestyle. The more you bring the right people into your life, who follow the lifestyle as well, the easier it will be for you to achieve your goals. Assess your surroundings, embrace the ones that should stay, distance yourself from the ones that shouldn’t and bring in the ones you still need to make you the better version of yourself you are determined on becoming. Train Well, Eat Well, Live Well.

Train Well, Eat Well and Live Well with www.TrainEatLive.com