To be healthy, wealthy and wise must be everybody’s dream. What is the most valuable? It has got to be health. Health is something you can’t buy. Sometimes, though we don’t give as much thought to our health as we should.

When we are growing up, most of us don’t give our health any thought whatsoever. When something goes wrong though, we soon sit up and take notice, but by that time it may be too late.

Diet is somebody else’s concern when we are young, we don’t worry ourselves about it. All we are interested in is getting more of what we like – which is usually candy, cake and cookies washed down with copious quantities of cola.

When we become teenagers we begin to notice others and make comparisons. This is the first time we become aware of how we look. It’s the first time it becomes an important issue in our lives.

Parents often have a difficult job convincing their children to eat green vegetables. At an early age, we are not the least interested in what is good for us. We rebel against what we don’t like, and in far too many instances parents lose out to headstrong children. The resulting diet in those crucial years is often not as good as it should, or could be.

Arriving in early adulthood overweight is not helpful. To have so many ingrained bad habits as far as eating and exercise is concerned makes doing something about it difficult – although not impossible.

The most important thing is to break bad habits and that requires developing an awareness of what they are. Many of the bad habits will have been endorsed by upbringing. To go against this can be a challenge. What has been accepted as a family culture in terms of diet and exercise takes real resolve and determination to change.

Change can be made easier by not going against the norm, but by learning new habits – slim habits, if you like. New habits will enable change to take place without having to directly confront the past.