The Dividend Lifestyle
Everybody loves the story of Grandpa Fred and the way he was able to pass wealth down for generations to come but is this strategy available to everyone? The short answer is yes, it’s available to everyone, but the longer answer is that it takes a lot of time to develop, like anything good.
Maybe you are brand new to exercise and nutrition. Let’s say you’re a guy who hasn’t seen the inside of a weight room since high school PE class. Let’s also assume you subscribe to the Standard American Diet (S.A.D.) and presently look and feel like garbage. Now all of a sudden you’re motivated to lose weight and get healthy. Perhaps your doctor informed you that you’re pre-diabetic, or maybe your “fat pants” no longer fit, hey we've all been there. Whatever the reason for this newfound motivation, the bottom line is you’re focused and determined to get in shape! What do most people do in this situation? Depending on their level of motivation they could take an extreme shortcut which would mean you take medications, crash diet, or have surgery. Some resort to other desperate “get ripped quick schemes” such as taking hormone injections and other dangerous chemicals and frankly, in the short term, these extreme options can provide quick results.
The problem there is that, over the long term, you’re going to do serious damage. It’s going to be detrimental to your health. Your blood pressure’s going to go up. Your liver is going to be shot. Your joints are going to get inflamed. It’s just not sustainable. You’re going to end up worse than before you started and most likely reduce your life expectancy. That’s what we don’t want to do. Like get rich quick schemes, get ripped quick schemes never work long term. You gain all the weight back and end up fatter and sicker than before you started.
The proper way to approach this for our friend just starting out would be to take a slow and steady approach towards his fitness and health goals. Hire a good personal trainer who can understand your goals, objectives, body type, nutritional requirements, habits, and lifestyle. Start introducing exercise with proper form and technique. Make slow lifestyle adjustments to your diet rather than going on a crash diet. Maybe slowly reduce the amount of processed foods you are consuming and replace them with whole foods. Create a food log and track your calories and macronutrients.
Let’s slowly ease into it because that’s more sustainable. Maybe introduce the concept of getting a food scale to understand how many calories you’re consuming a day and have a nutritionist build you a caloric daily “budget”. Are you getting the proper amount of nutrients, proteins, carbs, and fats? This approach gets you, through education, to understand that process. Slowly, over time, you start to develop new habits, get a little bit stronger in the gym, and become healthier, but it’s all done the proper way through time and quality. That’s significantly better in the long term, and your odds of reaching your goals are exponentially better. You’re going to get the results you need. It may just take a little longer.
In fact, it will take a lot longer. A steroid freak Hollywood actor may be able to get in Spartan like shape in just three or four months, but it may take a normal person doing things the right way, three or four years. When they get there, though, they will be able to continue that lifestyle indefinitely. They’re going to be able to teach their kids and their grandkids that same approach to a healthy lifestyle. They’ll probably live longer than the steroid freak. The person doing it the right way is sure to lead a more happy and successful life.
Dividend Lifestyle is the same as getting financially fit and doing it the right way. It takes discipline and patience to see the plan through to fruition because it’s something that, if done properly, will take many years and, in most cases, many decades to do properly. It’s available for anybody to start. You can start learning these strategies at any age. You can be 18, or you can be 80 and start learning and start implementing.