I want to tell you that you must exercise. It doesn’t matter if you’re a child, an adolescent, an adult, a senior citizen, everybody has to move.

The only time you get to take a break is when you’re sleeping, first of all, and then if you get injured, of course, you must take time to rest and recover from the injury. Other than that, you want to keep your body moving and there’s a really great device on this little watch here that tells me every hour, it reminds me to get up from the desk and to go for a walk or a stroll or a move gets moving somehow. If I get up 10 minutes before the hour’s up, it tells me a great job, because I’ve created an advantage for my body by keeping moving. It keeps track every hour throughout the waking day if I’ve reached that goal of the movement.

As we grow older, we have a tendency to slow down a little bit, we lose a step or two. That’s perfectly normal. If you get injured, you’ve got to take some time off, that’s also normal, but in everyday life, movement is involved. It’s actually the principal sign of life. A lot of it may have to do with what type of job you have, what kind of occupation you have. If you’re an outdoor salesman and you’re driving 250, 300 miles a day, and you’re visiting 10 clients, you’re in and out of the car moving, then for sure, you’re getting a lot of steps in and you can get a step counter right on your watch if you want to try to keep track of how many miles you’re actually walking each day. Once you retire, there are clubs of people that go walking together in the neighborhoods and if it’s inclement weather outside, there are walking clubs that meet at the shopping mall.

I know the pandemic’s disrupted a lot of that, but we’re getting back to normal a little bit now, that’s a good thing. Walking clubs and having that interaction with other human beings is very important. There’s another thing you can do that’s really interesting and that is YouTube is now available on most Smart TVs. If you’ve bought a new TV in the last five years, more than likely you can get YouTube up on your TV and there are literally thousands and thousands and thousands of workout videos that you can do at home without having to get down on the ground, without having to do sit-ups or pushups or anything like that. Of course, those are there too, but there are standing workout videos where you’re just moving.

It’s almost like dancing a little bit, just moving your body and getting all those muscles moving and getting that core tightened and you can raise a knee like that.

You can even be sitting in a chair and you can go like this. This is a really good exercise if you can’t get up out of the chair and you got to take just a 60-second break just to move your body. It’s a good move. This is actually moving all the organs in your gut so it’s good for your gut health, your little gut friends, your little bacteria in there love this movement. What if you’re an outdoor salesman and then as you get older, you get switched to indoor sales and you’re sitting at a desk 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 hours a day. Is that going to affect your life? Is that going to change your physiology? It certainly will. So let’s keep in mind that the movement of our body is critically important to our mental state.

When I say mind state, exercise, diet, and sleep, I’m telling you that they’re all interconnected. It all starts with a mental state, but your movement and your physiology affect your mental state just as what you’re eating affect your mental state. It’s a two-way street. Your mind state affects what you eat. Your mental state affects how much you move, but the movement and what you eat are affecting your mental state, so there is an elliptical cycle going on between the gut and the brain, between the body and the brain. Generally, we say the body follows the mind, but the mind is influenced by the body. It’s a cycle. It keeps going around and around. When you move into retirement age and you’ve really slowed down a lot, and you’ve taken up a hobby, let’s say you want to try painting or sculpture or some other hobby that is an inside sort of thing, then certainly your physiology is going to change.

Most people I know who’ve retired, I know a few of them, who’ve gone from walking eight miles a day as a full-time librarian and then taking up art in a studio. Well, maybe gardening would be a nice addition and to counterbalance the inside work versus being outside and moving your body and doing a squat once in a while to dig into the dirt and to remember from whence we came and who we are, really.

At the very bottom of the essence of life, we’re dust, right?

“From dust thou art to dust thou shalt return.” We’re basically made out of carbon. All of our molecules have something to do with carbon or related to carbon and that’s who we are. I’m going to share a couple of ways to get back into exercise if you’ve fallen away.

I mentioned on YouTube already, that there are really great, absolutely free programs that you can follow. Many teachers teach fitness at every different level. If you just Google for beginner’s workout or beginners H-I-I-T workout, that’s high-intensity interval training, that’s a very important cardiovascular idea that helps us to remain fit on the inside as well as the outside. You can Google these things. You can search for this on YouTube, so many free resources there. You can go for a walk. You can learn to take up walking as a hobby and noticing things outside, noticing the trees, noticing the insects, noticing the animal life, noticing, oh, we’re going to notice insects very soon when the cicadas, the 17-year cicadas start erupting and emerging from the ground. It’s going to be very, very interesting and a bit of a shock for a lot of people.

You can go for a swim. There are a lot of swimming pools and swimming clubs and a lot of gyms nowadays have swimming pools built into their membership. Swimming’s a fun thing to do. I’m going to put some links below in the description and in the commentary for some of my favorite workout programs that I do. I’ve taken up in the last month exercising for, I started with 10 minutes, 20 minutes, now I’m up to 30 minutes every morning before I break my fast, before I have breakfast, I work out on an empty stomach. It feels really good. It gets you going and you find that you really don’t have to eat so much if you’ve worked out and your body is moving and your blood’s flowing.

The amount of fuel that you need, actually, you get a better registration and better feedback from your body if you’re not eating out of just plain habit, but you’re actually listening to your body and feeding it what it really needs and what it really deserves.