Baby Steps
Many of you may be familiar with the saying “it’s easier said than done”, and while there may be some truth to that, we must remember that oftentimes we look at the BIG picture rather than the smaller bite-size portions of reaching a goal.
FWAACA (formally known as the Fort Wayne African American Cancer Alliance) is a community based organization whose focus in on the prevention and early detection of cancer in the African-American and medically underserved communities. We have evidence-based best practices that involve the re-education of principles regarding nutrition, physical activity, and getting screened regularly for cancer.
One of our programs, Down Home Healthy Living (DHHL), is an arrangement of components to address how we eat, how we move, and how we interact with the healthcare community. All of these issues seem to be easy to approach, but in reality we are a long way from being at optimal performance on any of them.
In this series, we would like to briefly address each one of them from a perspective that small changes will turn into big ones, if persistent. Unfortunately, I have come to realize that technology has made us such an impatient people that if we don’t see instant results, we don’t want to do it anymore, or we chastise ourselves with failure and assume our original condition.
With that being said, let’s begin with a small goal. For some of you, it may be very difficult to give up drinking soda. Soda pop has absolutely no nutritional value and contains very high amounts of sugar that over time our body stores as fat. Your argument may be that you need something sweet to drink and it doesn’t cost as much as juice (and I’m speaking of 100% juice, not the 99 cent gallon of water and sugar with color drinks). So, maybe we work on taking baby steps in eliminating soda from your diet by reducing the amount of soda you drink each day by 1. If you normally drink 5 sodas a day….cut back to 4. Try that for one week. If you still are among the living, then try cutting back on one more per day for another week. Hopefully you see where I’m going where over time, you should be able to eliminate soda completely from your diet and you have replaced it with something like, say….water! Water is the best, and most natural source of nourishment (in beverage form) that helps cleanse our bodies of toxins, moves food through our system, and helps hydrate our body.
Some would say I chose one of the worst possible scenarios; but compared to what? We can’t continue to sugar-coat (no pun intended) our real issues! I am describing someone’s reality! One thing we (FWAACA) realize is that we have to meet people where they are and then help them to get to a better place by changing thoughts, perceptions, and choices. It doesn’t happen overnight just as our health condition didn’t erode overnight – it took years of choices that tend to be harmful to our bodies. We are not in the business to give you a host of directions without reasons why we’re encouraging change. We simply want to eliminate cancer and other chronic preventable diseases from our community. We must begin with baby steps and take each day at a time. With persistence, change will occur!
Stay tuned for more on Baby Steps
