Health is wealth. As commonplace as clichés may be, fitness in my experience is far from it. Sure, the environment, mundane pressures, and increasing competition don’t make it easy. But focusing too much on the uncontrollable will only add to stress and take away from the very objective. So what about ourselves makes it so difficult? And what can we do about it? More so without making inordinate effort and without feeling like we’re giving up on the things we’re used to enjoying?

I’ve been in the valleys, braced steep windward ridges, and been on (personal) peaks of fitness on more than one occasion now so as to be able to articulate the most insightful epiphanies, the simplest steps, and the greatest promises of focusing on one’s fitness. It was on the last, perhaps the most difficult ascent I’ve had to make that I realised one of the highest forms of loving oneself (for we all do right?) is through discipline. The promise, other than the obvious ones of looking and feeling good, are that focusing on one’s fitness helps in surmounting other challenges (including psychological ones) and in tuning the critical instrument required to make the most of the precious gift of life – our bodies. Now as far as the steps go, here’s why I’m convinced they’re incremental yet simple. I wouldn’t have hit the valleys multiple times had I been as strong as I would have liked to be. So, I had to come up with changes that were not only easy enough to get started with but also easy enough to hold on to. Just as one example, my fitness programme comes without spending money on a gym membership – since 2017.