I love being a dad. I’ve always known I would enjoy it, but I never imagined how much love I would have for my little boy. I grew up with babies constantly around me as I have a dozen nieces and nephews ranging from 2-20 years old. It’s true what they say. You just can’t understand the love until you have your own. Being in the health and fitness field, it always felt like my son would be my own personal experiment. I can finally take someone, literally from the first day of life, and implement everything I’ve learned to create the optimal human being. I think we all do that in some way or another. If not in relationship to our child’s physical well-being, we often make vows to make sure our child is raised in a way that gives them advantages in other areas of life. Advantages that we wish we would have had. We make vows to make sure they never go through what we went through. To let them learn from our mistakes and our accomplishments.
I made it my mission to give my son the best possible chance of having a healthy physical body through the nutritional and fitness knowledge I’ve gained over 28 years of life. I’ll have to write another blog on exactly what my wife and I have done and why we have done things this why, but that’s not what I want to share this time. For now, I will just say that we have walked the perfect line (to our knowledge) in terms of nutrition and movement. And after 10 months, this is one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned:You can never 100% control the outcome of another human being.
Here’s what I mean. As health and fitness professionals, we strive to improve the lives of others. Sometimes that means helping someone lose weight. Other times that means helping an athlete reach peak performance. Yet other times, it’s helping someone learn how to walk and feed themselves again. We fitness professionals pin our reputation, our self-worth (for right or wrong), our livelihood, and even our measure of life success (again for right or wrong) on helping others achieve positive outcomes. This, at times, is incredibly rewarding. It feeds our soul to serve others.
But the reality is, not everyone reaches their goals. Sometimes life gets in the way. Sometimes commitment levels aren’t high enough. Sometimes people can’t afford the type of service or care that they need to truly reach their goals. Shoot, sometimes goals just aren’t realistic. This is a true day in the life of every health and fitness professional you know. For various reasons, we can’t always get people to their goals and it crushes us when we don’t. It keeps us up at night. It racks our brains and drives us into hours of research searching for an answer. It causes us to question nearly everything we know and do at times.
In a day where every kid gets drilled in their head that life’s success depends on a 4.0 GPA, a college athletic scholarship, or worldwide fame, we need to accept and teach the reality that: 1) Not achieving those things doesn’t define you and 2) Achieving those things doesn’t necessarily equate to the “perfect” life they sometimes envision. You can do everything you think is right and still not get what you truly want. It’s not always in your hands.
Parents, health and fitness pros, children, and well, everyone; Can we stop beating ourselves up with impossible expectations? Can we strive for perfection while being prepared and satisfied with nearly missing the mark? Perhaps that’s “unamerican”. Or perhaps we need to redefine what it means to be American in this sense. I think the happiness and health of the younger generation may depend on it
If this has reached you on a personal level we would love to hear your thoughts!
Eric, have you tried goats milk formula for your little one? Supposed to help with digestion and skin issues like eczema. I researched this for someone a few years ago. They didn’t want to switch and at least try it out so I can’t give any personal feedback.
We actually don’t do any formulas. Breastfeeding and real food. We have gone as far as eliminating things from my wife’s diet but we’ve always been pretty on top of it anyway.
For the most part, we’ve chalked up his skin issues to his body just learning how to excrete things. They would come and go hand in hand with his digestion. It’s been about a month solid with good bowel movements and his face is actually now cleared.