What's Your Stepping Stone?

Everyone needs a stepping stone. What’s yours? In other words, what is your reason for your goals?

My stepping stone is my father. You see my father had a very nasty stroke over 5 years ago, and laid in a bed for months asleep before he woke up, which was a miracle in itself. He then stayed in a bed for few more months, not being able to feed himself, or move many body parts. He could barely talk, and I’m not even sure he knew who I was at times.

You see my father didn’t really take care of himself. Instead he took care of everyone else. He was great like that. However, he can no longer take care of anyone because he forgot to take care of the one person that matters most, himself. He didn’t exercise, he ate absolutely horribly, he never even had any vitamins that I knew of. He just wasn’t the healthiest person in the world by any means.

As I saw him laying in those hospital beds, being moved from one hospital to another, to another, and yet another, knowing that he was never going to be the same “father” as I knew him to be all my life, it honestly just hurt me. Call it selfish, call it what you will, but as a fitness professional, I knew all the things he could have done to prevent this from happening. As a son, I was mad that he let the one thing go that nobody should…their own health.

So by his unfortunate passing 5 years ago, I as a fitness professional, and I as a human being simply don’t want to see anyone have to go through what my father did. Nor do I want anyone have to watch the suffering of a loved one go through that.

This is what drives me. My goal in life is to help others not get to that point, to prevent that from happening. So in a way, my father’s passing is my stepping stone, my reason, my purpose for bettering the health of others, possibly even you.

I just happen to own a great fitness training center, a place where people can go to improve their health and fitness levels and be educated about proper eating habits, and I just happen to have the best nutritional supplements on the planet available to others to improve on their proper eating habits. These are just two ways out of many how I can help improve upon the health of others.

Again, I ask you what your stepping stone is. What is your reason or your purpose for the goals you have set? I ask this because when you know what this is, your results are much more likely to happen.


Chad Cannon is the owner of Shaping Concepts Fitness Training Center, in Bluffton, SC, and is an independant distributor for AdvoCare International.

Sometimes Your Own Family Secretly Wants You To Fail!

Even though you have made the decision to become a better person, to improve your health, your body, your appearance, your lifestyle, sometimes it may be more disheartening when trying to get the support needed from your family members, especially a spouse.

Many times a family will be the cause of going back to the way it’s always been…eating fattening, sugary foods, not exercising, feeling lazy all the time, and blaming yourself again and again.

So there are two questions I have for you…

One, why do our own family members secretly feel this way and how do they secretly sabotage us?

Two, what can we do about it to help you in your success?

Let’s start with question one…Why do our family members secretly feel this way? That’s easy. They are simply put…Jealous! They have not built up the strength to do what you have started. Everyone drives themselves (in a health conscious manner) from their personal emotion. Your husband cannot and should not drive emotion to lose weight because you are unhappy with your body. Your husband needs to be unhappy in some way to make a change. If he simply tries to make a lifestyle commitment to improve himself from your emotion, it just won’t last. He has to have his own emotional feelings to make a personal change. Therefore, he may want you to succeed, but deep down, if he knows he doesn’t have the strength and willpower to make a change himself, he doesn’t want you to succeed. That will make him feel very weak and lonely himself.

So not knowing what he is doing, he will bombard you with uncontrollable emotional breakdowns, like bringing home donuts, or always having candy in the house. He might even give you something as a present for doing a great job, but secretly knowing it could help break you down, like a box of chocolates.

Your spouse doesn’t really want you to fail. They do love you and want the best for you, but they don’t want you to have success unless they know they can too. If they are simply not emotionally ready, they will secretly bombard and sabotage you, not really knowing that they are doing so.

Okay, so what can we do about this to help us achieve our successes we really want to have? We have obviously come to some kind of understanding that we need a change in order to feel better about ourselves. We understand that to be healthy, we must eat better than we used to. We must exercise more than we used to and in a proper way. We must take care of ourselves emotionally in order to maintain all this. We had some kind of emotional setback in our lifetime that scared us enough to do something about it. So keep this in mind that you have already made the commitment. It is there! That has not changed. Your reason for making an improvement is still there right in front of you.

The only thing that is different now is the lack of support from certain people. (the people that have not yet had that emotional breakdown, which is no fault to them. They just have not had it yet.) We need to make these people understand that even though they are not going through this, that these changes you are trying to make, to make yourself better, are very hard, emotionally, physically, even spiritually sometimes, and you will need all the help and support you can get.

You need to make these people understand that you cannot have junk food in the house. So if they have it, it’s got to be stored somewhere else. They must also understand that you need extra time now, time for your exercise, time for preparing healthy meals. By the way, you are only taking care of you, and no one else. If they want to be a part of it, they must tell you. Don’t make your family members eat healthy meals just because you have made the change. They must want to for a reason, an emotional reason they have themselves.