A 1988 Nike campaign coined the ad slogan “Just Do It,” catapulting the sports brand into fame and fortune. Those three words work for so many situations, whether you are weighing whether you should go to the gym or you are procrastinating on a work assignment.
It is the empowered voice we all have inside of ourselves. It may have even started with your mother, who became frustrated when you were taking too long tying your shoelaces.
“Just do it,” she may have snapped, after asking you politely 15 times.
Let’s remodel this slogan for the purposes of this article.
Just do something.
This is not a war cry for the lazy, in fact quite the opposite. Our sedentary culture means that even if we work out hard for one hour a day, the majority of the time our body is re-designing itself around the fact that we are becoming professional sitters.
Katy Bowman, author of “Alignment Matters: The First Five Years of Katy Says,” wrote, “Watch your habits, for they become your posture. Watch your posture, for it creates your boundaries. Watch your boundaries, for they restrict your growth. Watch your restrictions, for they create immobility. Watch your immobility, for it becomes your illness.”
So rather than doing all (our workouts) or nothing (our sitting), we have to find an in-between.
Do something.
Walk part of the way to work. Carry your groceries farther than you have to. Eat the pizza, but don’t finish all of it. Eat the salad without feeling like it is all you should be eating in order to be healthy.
Go for a bike ride because you like it. Dance and lip-sync to the hits from when you were in high school. Stretch and pump iron while you watch TV.
Take pictures of the view from a paddleboat. Take pictures of the slice of cake you are enjoying with your friend.
Do something.
Something means that we need to pay attention to what we are doing all of the time, rather than some of the time. A shocking statistic recently declared that 97 percent of dieters regained everything that they lost within three years wrote Slate.com.
This is because the nature of a diet is all or nothing. Any eating plan or exercise plan needs some wiggle room, and we haven’t failed because we didn’t have time to reach our own high expectations. We don’t need diets and extreme workouts. We need to do something rather than everything.
Our core shouldn’t just be used in a fitness class but in our life. Our posture shouldn’t be awesome in Pilates and then slouchy the rest of the time. We have to pay attention to all the little somethings that add up to everything.
Reviewed June 8, 2016
by Michele Blacksberg RN
Edited by Jody Smith