Floss Your Body

How many of you guys actually floss? And how many of you floss twice a day? I'm assuming not all of you. And why's that? I mean, let's be real: flossing is boring.

But you understand that not doing it will cause health problems later on, and a professional will get you upset by reminding your lazy ass that you need to do it.

Does that sound familiar?

Yes, I'm talking about exercise.

Exercising and flossing are things that people avoid, but must be done often in order to maintain a healthy life.

And I'm not just talking about resistance training. Run! Jump rope! Do yoga! Focus solely on stretching or mobility! If you treat this as something that you absolutely need to do, you'll benefit.

This is what whiners say:

• It’s hard to keep it up.

• Missing a few days won’t hurt (days become years).

• Doesn’t fit into the schedule.

Not exercising has a compound effect, just like flossing does. If you don’t floss, your teeth will fall out, and you’ll get Alzheimer’s disease much more easily. If you don’t exercise, you’ll need a walker, and you'll get fat much more easily.

Many people say that you need to love exercise so that you do it 3x per week. Yes, that helps, but you don't need to like anything. No one likes flossing, for example. You simply need to treat exercise as maintenance for your body. As in, this is something that you just need to do if you want your body to work at 100% on a day-to-day basis.

Here's what you get when you do that:

• Live a longer life because you won’t be causing any one of a million issues that could end your life prematurely.

• Save money by not paying for walkers, wheelchairs, and hip surgery when you’re older, just like you get to avoid oral surgery by flossing.

• Have a higher quality of life overall because your body isn't slowly deterioriating.

• As a former fat boy with very middling teeth, it won't surprise you to know that I used to not exercise, and I’d neglect flossing.

For flossing, I saw what could happen to some people’s teeth when they got older and wanted to avoid that (and the expensive surgeries it would take to fix them). When I started flossing more, I noticed fewer and fewer problems during my dental visits.

For exercising, I started because a friend showed me that it was possible for a normal guy to lose a ton of weight. Once I knew that the only thing preventing me from achieving that goal was myself, I knew I couldn’t let myself down. I set very strict schedules because I knew this was possible, and I wasn’t about to be the weakest link of my own plan. To this day, I still keep a schedule like that.

How to start this health routine:

1. Set a goal and/or a reverse goal. Think about what you really want, or what you really don’t want. If either is powerful enough, it’ll be a great aide in your journey.

2. Set a schedule.

3. Set up backup plans in case it goes wrong.

4. Measure your progress (or have someone else do it) so that you can confirm the results of your change in habits.

Come back in 30 years, and thank me. Seriously, comment here in 30 years. Save the date.