To make a real change in your health and fitness, start with a change of outlook

Any real fundamental change in our happiness and well-being starts with a change of attitude.

This simple exercise will boost your energy and your motivation, but it takes a 30-day commitment.

Buy an inexpensive notebook at The Dollar Store or Target, or reuse a half-filled one from the top shelf of a closet.

For the next 30 days, at bedtime or in the morning when you wake up, write two paragraphs, in long-hand, in your best handwriting, about what you are thankful for that day.


It could be your job, your kids, ice cream, or that the car repair was less than you thought it would be. At some point it ought to include that you live in a free society where life is ordered and safe, that your heart beats steadily and you are alert, aware, alive, and free to experience and dream.

Every day is a gift. Every aspect of our minds and our bodies and our friends and our families are incredibly precious. Do you know how much people pay for a kidney, a heart or a lung transplant? Do you know how precious your eyes are? If you were broken and alone, how much would you give to hold the ones you love one more time?

Positive energy increases when we celebrate it. The power of what we have and enjoy, the opportunities and blessings all around us grows exponentially when we list and count and pray over their value.

It becomes easier to live with faith, hope and possibility when we treasure our gifts.

If you feel defeated, discouraged and unmotivated, there may be some compelling reasons that deserve empathy and attention, but taking stock of the wholeness and hope in our lives dramatically increases our awareness and confidence in the here and now.

Just two paragraphs. A page if you're feeling inspired. Make it genuine. Search out your heart. Become more aware of your blessings, even more grateful for your challenges and frustrations and what they have to teach you. Be genuine. Think about the incredible value of what you have and who you are, with humility and gratitude and wonder.

Here is what I wrote today. It won't win a Nobel Prize, but I am authentically grateful for all these things:

I am thankful for warmth and intimacy and the challenges of communication, of having to work through problems and misunderstandings, discovering each other in a deeper way. I am thankful for Vicki's kindness, generosity, warmth and affection, the small gestures she makes, the caring she expresses, and her incredible capacity to appreciate being loved.

I am thankful for green tea and the comfort of routine and ritual. I am thankful for work.

I am thankful for vigorous, soulful, transforming dance. I am thankful for Pandora and my computer, for blues, jazz, classical and folk, for the experience of being moved, lifted, carried away, inspired and transformed.

I am thankful for the ambition to be better and to grow.

 I am thankful for challenges, problems, mysteries, puzzles. I am thankful for creativity and inspiration. I am thankful for urgency, ambition, vision and desire. I am thankful for the power of dreams.

I am thankful for balance, coordination and the ability to move. I am thankful for an energized and healthy body.

I am thankful for nourishment, the opportunity to taste and see. 

I am thankful to live in an orderly society, relatively free of oppression and injustice, though both surely exist and must not be tolerated.

Help me to find my voice and be conscientious about my time and choices. Instill in me a quiet reverence for the sacred, the essential, the precious, the transcendent, the things of faith, hope and love. Help me to be a man of urgency, decency, devotion, gentleness and purpose, a warrior of light who chooses the light and shares it.

Thank you for another day to grow and learn.

I am thankful for all that I experience. I am grateful to be aware, alive, sentient and receptive.

--On any given day you can wax philosophical or stick to the basics, but if you remain faithful to the exercise for 30 days, the awareness of your amazing personal richness will have far more power in your life.

And the challenge to exercise and get moving will become far more natural for you. The way you speak, act and walk will fundamentally change, and your light will grow.