YOLO: Leading the Way

This photo was taken a month before I began my fitness challenge.

It's hard to believe that I'm coming up on a year since I started my first fitness challenge on July 1, 2012. I am honored and pleased to be featured on my coach's page as a success story, inspiring others to also improve their own fitness.

To read my story -- along with many others who have succeeded at changing their health and lives -- go to her website, YoLo Live Healthy.

Here's the unknown benefit of this change in my life that I did not realize would happen until it did:

Life is easier.

Sure, people say "you have more energy," but you don't realize what that means, personally. For me it means that simple, every day tasks take less effort, less time, and I have more time for the things in life that are important to me, like singing at the top of my lungs in public in order to embarrass my 10-year-old. (It's so much fun, you should try it if you have a 10-year-old. Borrow one if you need to, it's totally worth it.)

It means that when I go grocery shopping, I am not sapped from the hour-plus activity of pushing a cart through crowded aisles, bagging groceries, carrying them up a flight of stairs two bags at a time to my house and putting them all away. It means that when my daughter asks "Mom, will you push me on the swing?" after grocery shopping the answer is YES.

It means that my kids ask to do more things with me now, because the answer is YES more often than it is NO. Yeay family time!

I was driving through the neighborhood a couple of days ago returning from one of my errands, and I saw a mom and her kids walking up the stairs to their house, returning home from whatever activity they had been to, bags in both hands. While the kids were bounding up the stairs (also carrying bags, mind you), the mom was putting her foot on each step like it weighed 50 pounds and was difficult to lift again. I could see the exhaustion in her posture. I imagine that the minute they hit the house she collapsed on the couch to recover from wherever they had been. Maybe they were coming back from running a marathon, but I suspect the activity was something a little less arduous than that. I wanted to pull over, jump out of the car and say, "I can help you with that feeling." Because I know it, it is familiar to me. But it doesn't happen to me anymore.

Be inspired. But don't just read this and say "That's so inspiring." It's only inspiring if you take action, if you become inspiring to others in changing your own life.

Come on. Take the challenge. You'll love it.

You Only Live Once.