It isn’t as hard as you think to live a healthy lifestyle! A healthy lifestyle is a lifestyle which improves and maintains your physical and mental well being. Eating right, getting exercise and generally taking care of your own well being. But for some reason, it’s something that so many of us struggle to maintain. Many of us will say “Diet starts Monday” or buy a gym membership but the diet either lasts a short time or doesn’t materialise and the gym membership just gets wasted.
In fact, according to a recently published survey, 38% of UK adults are trying to lose excess weight and we can bet that at least another 30% are at least thinking about starting a healthy lifestyle.
So how do you do it? How do you change your lifestyle for good?
Diet
Whether you are following a structured diet plan or you are just counting calories, its all a step in the right direction! The road to living a healthy lifestyle for good, (the key to maintaining that weight loss) can be a long one so it is important to find out what works for you!
Exercise
Its the same with exercise! If you are not used to exercising, then jumping straight into a gym membership can be daunting. But getting more exercise into your daily life does not have to be hard. Taking the stairs more often or walking that little bit further everyday is a good way to start.
Tips on how to live a healthy lifestyle
It’s always good to have a checklist of tips to keep you on the right track, so here at Totally Transformed, we’d like to give you our top hints to follow to keep you on track to making a lifestyle change and sticking to it.
- Drink plenty of water. Ideally try and drink at least 2 litres every single day! Up to 60% of the human body is made up of water and we lose it when we sweat and use the toilet so replenishing lost water should always be top priority to keep your body working at optimum condition.
- Eat a variety of foods. Too often, when we’re “dieting”, we find a meals that are ideal to fit in with that diet, and we tend to repeat that meal over and over again, until we get bored and give up. Varying your diet and using a multitude of healthy foods in your cooking will not only keep your diet fresh, it will give you a bank of meals that you can eat and stay on the right path.
- Get enough sleep. When you are tired, you are less likely to have the energy or motivation to make healthy choices. This is when ‘snaccidents’ happen. Getting a decent nights sleep is also important for skin health.
- Exercise! Aim to get in at least 30 minutes of exercise per day! Like we said earlier, you don’t need to go to an insanely high tempo fitness class to get more exercise (unless you really want to that is!) Walking, gentle jogging and even swimming are ideal ways to get in your daily exercise quota.
- Increase your intake of fruit. Fruit contains fructose (a naturally occurring sugar) and so it’s ideal for those of us with a sweet tooth! Plus fruit are packed with vitamins, minerals and antioxidants. Fruit makes an incredibly nutritious and satisfying breakfast too.
- Don’t skip meals. Eat a healthy and nutritious breakfast, lunch and dinner. Try to add in healthy snacks too. Eating small healthy portions often throughout the day will reduce the risk of getting hungry and reaching for the quick and unhealthy snacks.
- Vegetables are just as important as fruit. Vegetables contain a multitude of nutrients and minerals like folate, vitamin K, folate, vitamin A, manganese, and potassium.
- Avoid trigger foods. We all have that one food that once we eat it, we just want more and more of it and before you know it, you have slipped back into your old ways. Know your trigger food, whether it be chocolate, crisps, fast food or something equally as high in saturated fat and calories.
- Prepare your meals (or even plan them at the least). Planning our meals or having ready prepared nutritious meals will make choosing healthy over convenient much easier. It makes shopping easier too as we only need to buy the food we have planned for.
- Exercise portion control! Too many of us pile our plates high and to ensure we don’t waste food we eat whatever is on our plate. The eat well plate is a good guide on what we should be putting on our plates! Remember, it is okay to stop eating when you feel full!
What are the benefits?
Improving your lifestyle to be healthier has so many astonishing benefits. It can aid weight loss, make your skin glow, and reduce the risk of so many life threatening diseases. We know breaking habits is hard. Eating fast and convenient (and often unhealthy) foods is a habit which is hard to break. However soon, the new healthy lifestyle will become your habit in replacement of the ones you have broken and all of the above will become second nature.
Our Facebook page has so much more helpful advice on staying healthy and non surgical body sculpting treatments can use to enhance yourself in your new lifestyle!