Life gets busy and I know it’s hard to find the right balance in order to stay healthy. However, there are some things that if you do them consistently they will help you stay healthy so you can do all the things you need to and want to do with energy and excitement.
#1 5 Ways To Stay Healthy Start With Losing The Excuses
Excuses will weigh you down and keep you from reaching your potential. Excuses are what the mind makes up to avoid feeling guilty about not achieving a task you know you ought to achieve. We often use excuses that sabotage our desire to stay healthy. If we started our workout from the moment we first thought about it, we would be done with it before we finished compiling a list of excuses. Excuses about food and weight and diet are the worst things for you. If you continue to tell yourself the same excuses over and over you will eventually believe them. This is when the downhill cycle begins.
Stop this cycle before it begins by losing your excuses! By losing excuses you will be well on your way to losing pounds and allowing yourself to stay healthy.
#2 Stay Healthy By Not Skipping Workouts
Don’t skip your workout if you want to stay healthy. If you let yourself skip just one day it makes it easy to follow this pattern! You do need a rest day, but don’t skip several days in a row. This is a horrible habit to start. Instead do your workout and get it out of the way before your mind has a chance to come up with excuses. This is why I get up early each morning to workout. Do I like getting up early? NO! But if you study successful people, they create success habits. This means that they need to get up early so that it will get done, that is what they do. Find what works better for you. But know that sometimes you have to sacrifice in order to get the results you want.
#3 If You Want To Stay Healthy Then Stop Ignoring Strength Training
Strength and weight training should be a part of any exercise routine to stay healthy, although it is one that women will regularly avoid. If you are in the gym on a regular basis, you will be familiar with the sight of women on the cardio machines, such as the treadmill, exercise bikes and elliptical cross trainer, while the men are the ones on the weights machines and using free weights. If asked, these women will generally give the same response as to why they stick to cardio – they are trying to lose weight, get fitter, and don’t want to look like bodybuilders.
However, there are many reasons why women should start to incorporate some strength training and weight lifting into an exercise routine. As we age we lose bone density, strength training helps your bones. By stressing your bones, strength training increases bone density and reduces the risk of osteoporosis. If you are short of time, cut out some of the cardio work to make space for strength training in your busy schedule. Building muscle burns fat and helps you lose inches which means you’re losing fat.
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#4 In order to stay healthy you must Eat Right
What does eating right mean? It means eating little to no processed foods. Processed foods are what’s making you gain weight, hold onto weight, and feel sluggish. Processed foods are also not making you healthy. As we’ve added more processed foods into our lives the obesity rate has slowly increased. Go back to eating like your grandparents ate. I know we’re all super busy, but this is your health and it’s really important to make time to plan some meals, and prep your food. Once you get in the swing of it, you’ll see that it’s not really that time consuming and the benefits are well worth the effort.
The benefits:
- You’ll have more energy
- You’ll lose weight!
- You’ll feel more fulfilled after you eat
- You won’t be hungry an hour later and want more french fries
- You won’t be bloated after you eat
These are just a few of the benefits of eating clean and healthy. Don’t think you have to jump into this. Take it slow.
Gradually make changes to your diet, like incorporate more fiber into your system. Here are some foods that can increase the fiber content of your diet when eaten regularly. Grains which are high in fiber include whole wheat, whole rye, brown rice, and milled corn, unprocessed oatmeal, rolled oats, unprocessed miller’s bran, legumes, soy beans, lima beans, kidney beans, lentils, and chick peas. Vegetables which are high in fiber include lettuce, green beans, corn, cabbage, eggplant, brussels sprouts, and carrots. Fruits which are high in fiber include apricots, prunes, figs, pears, oranges, apples, and raisins.
Track your calories with an app like myfitnesspal or lose it if you have no idea of how many calories you’re eating or should be eating. These are good places to start and to get an idea how many calories you’re actually eating in a day.
#5 Lastly, but a very important factor, to help you stay healthy is to stop losing sleep
Many people underestimate the importance of sleep when they try to stay healthy. Sleeping is what gives your brain time to rejuvenate and your muscles time to repair. If ever you feel unmotivated at work, consider whether or not you slept well. If you don’t sleep, you don’t give yourself a chance to start fresh in the morning. While you may want to struggle with one remaining task before bed (after all, your mind tends to focus on uncompleted tasks rather than completed ones), you will actually waste more time struggling with it until the middle of night compared to sleeping properly and tackling it in the morning.
In order to focus more and improve your motivation, you don’t need coffee. You need sleep. When you sleep your brain processes the information that it cannot do when you are awake. It reviews what it learned that day and reinforces the information from short term to long term memory. In other words, the reading you did on social media marketing may be lost if you don’t sleep. Sleep also allows you to work out emotional problems through dreams, and solidify your memories. The first 90 minutes of your sleep pattern is the REM cycle. This is the time when the hormone levels in your brain adjust and your brain is energized. This is what is responsible for the feeling of alertness when you wake. It is also the part of your sleep schedule which regulates hunger.
As an adult, you need 7-8 hours of basal sleep each night. Basal sleep is regular sleep needed to focus. When you don’t get it, you rack up sleep debt which can lead to increased depression, substance abuse, heart disease, and weight gain.
Some people think they can catch up on their lost sleep. But you can’t. Sleeping in on the weekends does not actually improve your brain performance. It does not reverse the effects that sleep deprivation has on cognition. If you are deprived of sleep it increases your inflammatory levels as well as your stress levels.
The only way to rectify this sleep debt is to ensure you get consistent and ample rest. Play catch up by adding one hour of sleep per night regularly, not just three extra hours on the weekend. This will ensure your brain gets the oxygen it needs to reduce toxic levels of stress and help you focus in the morning.
What do you do to stay healthy? I would love to hear from you, so please post a comment and don’t forget to share and Pin It!
