Disclaimer: This On-Purpose Minute is nearly 10 minutes long because it is an excerpt from a keynote address. I apologize that the video quality is less than ideal, but the message still comes across.
The Back Story:
This month, I’m celebrating my 7th anniversary of reclaiming my health and creating a lifelong healthy lifestyle. In March 2008, I was tipping the scales at over 240 pounds on my 5′ 9″ frame. While I’ve always had an athletic, muscular build, I was wearing what I jokingly called “My fat suit.” Somewhere within the bundled layers of my fat suit was a trim Kevin W. McCarthy seeking liberation. Perhaps you relate.
Over the years my weight had been steadily increasing with more work, less exercise, and poor eating habits. I would skip breakfast, often skip lunch, and then eat dinner and have desserts the rest of the evening. I’ve since learned that this is how Sumo wrestlers get so big. I did not have a healthy lifestyle by any stretch of the imagination.
About a year earlier I took on a business client project of co-authoring a business book on a very tight timetable. This resulted in even more rapid weight gain as I was sitting for days on end researching and writing. The good news is that when my client sold his business, the book created an extra $15 million in company value. The bad news is the book resulted in me gaining an extra 25 or more pounds over my existing steady weight gain.
In March 2008, Dr. Wayne Scott Andersen booked me (sight unseen) as the keynote speaker for the July Take Shape For Life Annual Convention in Orlando. I asked about the program and got on it. I figured someone had to have figured out this weight thing because my feeble attempts at getting healthy weren’t working.
Three months later I stood on that stage a changed man from the inside out. Yes, I had lost 50 pounds but that wasn’t the half of it. I had learned to better understand my relationship with food and sweets, adopted a number of healthy habits, and discovered the power of using a systematic approach or program to health rather than using a diet.
As importantly, my weight loss inspired several of my friends, my business associates, and my wife to follow my lead. Within months ten people close to me were on the TSFL Program and also experiencing health gains. One friend, a Type 2 diabetic, was able to lose over 100 pounds and get off his medications. He tells me often that introducing him to Take Shape for Life probably saved his life. (Results vary by person so no medical claims are made here.)
Questions To Ask Yourself
1. How can we be on-purpose when we’re packing extra pounds and are unhealthy?
This typically self-inflicted health condition is within our control once we have a proven system to join with our decision to be healthy and apply our existing discipline that carries us well through life. This was much easier than I ever imagined! Over seven years later there’s still so much less of me to carry around since I lost my fat suit thanks to the power of making more informed and mindful decisions about living a healthier life.
The above 10-minute video excerpt is from my keynote address in July 2008. There’s a central question that I pose to the health coaches in attendance that is relevant to any of us about our life and work and being on-purpose:
2. Am I living my life with a question mark, period, or exclamation point?
To set up this video clip, I’m referring to the TSFL logo and referencing the “green dot” in the middle of the graphic to the right.
Enjoy this vignette and take it to heart. We only get one body to care for so get it right because getting it wrong is so costly. I hope this message catches the heartbeat of where you are in your life and inspires you to live boldly by beginning the process of being an on-purpose person in creation.
3. So What About Your Health?
Like I was, are you tired of wearing your fat suit?
If you already have a health coach, then press more deeply into the relationship to get the most benefit you can from the TSFL offerings.
If you don’t have a health coach and are ready to make a weighty lifestyle change to transform your life for the better, then let us help you. My wife Judith became a Certified Health Coach with TSFL as have I! Today, we help clients add health to their overall program of being on-purpose. Email me to set up a phone call. I’ll ask questions and help you determine if TSFL is right for you so you too can be on-purpose and live boldly into your life with an exclamation mark.
Be On-Purpose!
Kevin
P.S. This weekend Judith and I will be at the Take Shape For Life National Convention. Coincidentally it is in Orlando again and seven years later we’re living a healthy lifestyle as part of being on-purpose persons in creation.
