Personal Development Quick-Start Guide - For Teens!

CHAPTER FOUR - Health, Wealth and Relationships

In addition to theValues, Beliefs and Principles you have now chosen, there are threeparticular areas that you will need to focus on to build your dreamlife – Health, Wealth and Relationships. Why those three? Well, ina way, this is kind of a traditional religious teaching – humanbeings are creatures with a body and a soul, living in the world. Soit would make sense to develop your body, your soul and your place inthe world to achieve greater happiness!

HEALTH

Your body is the "you"that you can see and that you present to the world. Being happy withthe way it looks has an intimate connection to your personalself-esteem and how satisfied you are with yourself as a person andthe life you lead. It is difficult to feel like a success in life ifyou are constantly sick, hugely overweight or obese or extremely weakor skinny. It makes living your life more difficult and lessenjoyable and trying to make changes to it without any understandingof how to do that is both frustrating and demotivating.

Two ways

There are two basic waysto change the appearance of your body. You can GAIN MUSCLE orLOSE FAT. Try not to think in terms of "losing weight".Weight – what is it? Just the number of pounds or kilos. Do youreally just want to be a bigger or smaller version of the shape youare now? I may be wrong but I feel that you are probably moreinterested in changing your shape than changing your size. Even ifyou are seriously obese and look like a large ball, focusing onchanging your body shape is better than just ending up looking like asmaller ball. Further, muscle is much more active than fat. The moremuscle you have, the more energy you will burn.Also, your hormonal balance will be way better, with fat-burningtestosterone increasing and fat-storing estrogen decreasing as youput on more muscle, thus slowly increasing your fat loss over time.

When you think about it,a kilo of butter on a plate is way bigger than a kilo of steak. Soreplacing the butter with the same weight in steak will mean adecrease in size. In the same way, replacing a kilo of fat with akilo of muscle will also result in a decrease in overall body size.So, if you are a woman reading this, there is little fear of youbecoming "manly" or "muscly" if you start pushing and pullingweights around in the gym.

To gain muscle, youneed to LIFT WEIGHTS. You need to resistance a load by pushingor pulling against a heavy object. You also need to increase theamount of calories you eat. A typical healthy approach is to add 500calories per day to what you usually eat. A rather better way is totake your weight in pounds and eat 20 times that much in calories. Soa 150lb person would need to eat 3,000 calories per day to gainmuscle.

To lose fat, youneed to increase CARDIOVASCULAR EXERCISE. You need to increasethe speed your body breaks down food by expending a greater amount ofenergy than you take in through food. This can be helped by reducingcaloric intake to 500 calories fewer than you would normally eat. Youshouldn't go below 1,500 calories per day, though.

By doing these things,your body will adapt to the changes you are making upon it and thisshould lead to a change in body shape and size in the direction ofgreater health and improved athletic performance.

WEALTH

To most people, livingtheir dream life almost always means gaining increased wealth orfinancial success in life. "Get rich quick" schemes have trickedmany and spark the human imagination, even though they rarely work.