Hi there! I am Holly Barker, owner of Anytime Fitness Regina and Sponsored Bikini Athlete. I am proof that fitness can be fun and can work into any lifestyle you live. I am excited to bring a monthly note to you on how to live your happiest, healthiest and fittest lifestyle ever!!

I am going to start where everything starts. Forget yesterday or last week or last year. Forget about the events you have coming up and stop telling yourself how hard living the healthy life is during holidays, wedding or any social situations. Let go of excuses.

Living your healthiest lifestyle is a choice that you will make today and every day going forward. 

I urge you to continue to wake up every day and ask yourself: What life do I want to live? What do I see as success in MY near future?

Whether your idealistic successes are aesthetic, monetary, health, medical, event driven, you name it, the success in the results depend on where you start every day, one day at a time.  By making a choice to be your best, you will be capable of giving the world the best you there is. This starts with taking care of yourself, fuelling your body and, my favorite, playing and smiling each day!

So once you’ve decided to make this commitment, and you are eager to get started after starting…where do you begin? 

Step One: 

Managing Expectations:

Yes this may surprise you that the place to begin does not entail purchasing a gym membership and throwing out all carbohydrates in the premises.  The starting point I strongly recommend is within your own Mind, no equipment or diet pills necessary.

Once you have committed yourself to live your best life every day, I suggest setting short term and long term goals.  This may be a walk with your dog, a jog with your friends, a fun run, a marathon, a competition, a photoshoot or an adventurous holiday in the near future.  But the key here is that it must also be something greater in the long term. 

Where do you see your healthiest self benefitting you in the long term?  A lot of the time we falter in the short sites of the near future, we forget that there is life after that event.  We act as though we have completed the task and we allow ourselves to resume the lifestyle we lived previously, allowing bad habits to re enter our lives or run them more rampantly due to the sacrifices that we made to reach the short term triumph. 

I want you to align your expectations to the lifestyle you want to lead and put forth a plan that will help you succeed for life!  Setting a lifestyle goal is much different than preparing for an event in the near future.  We crash diet and create a bubble of misery in the days leading up to the event and create a cycle of false expectations to what living healthy and feeling great should mean. 

Throw out any previous thoughts that to succeed in a fit lifestyle, you must diet.  Throw out any previous thoughts that to succeed in a fit lifestyle, you must commit hours upon hours to the gym. 

Start by believing that you can do what you set out to do, come to terms that it will be harder before it gets easier and that to make this a lifestyle, you must embrace change.  When your expectations align with what you set out to do, the next steps that I cover will be worth every perceived sacrifice and the life you will lead going forward will be nothing short of amazing. 

Are you ready?