Healthy Habits to Catalyst Your Life
It can be hard to create healthy habits and keep them year-round. As an example, look at the calendar. Let’s say it is the end of September. Stores are tempting you with Halloween candy, and soon it will be the season filled with company parties, happy hours, and family gatherings – all of which you are expected to or at least feel compelled to attend. How do you survive these? By starting your healthy habits today.
Mindset
Whether you want to lose fat, build muscle, or maintain your current healthy weight, you must get your mind in the groove of making the right decisions based on your goal. Every choice builds your healthy habits and affects your chance of success. BLTs – bites, licks, and tastes – will sabotage your efforts. Skipping exercise will slow or bring to a standstill the progress you been working so hard to achieve. Did you know that after just two weeks of no exercise, you’ll begin to get soft and lose muscle tone?
Nutrition
Diets like Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig have an incredibly high recidivism rate because people stop following them since they can’t sustain that restrictive and expensive lifestyle. Yet they still return to them 7 or 8 or even more times, each time thinking that they are the failures, and not realizing that these diets are setting them up to fail.
Are you really going to live the rest of your life by counting the points for every meal you eat? What if you go to a restaurant that doesn’t show the point equivalents on their menu? Do you really think that 8 points of ice cream helps your body the same way that 8 points of grilled chicken does? Do you feel unsatisfied and crave other foods after eating Jenny Craig meals? The fillers and preservatives they use are part of the reason.
A healthy, sustainable solution is online nutrition coaching. You’ll learn what to eat, how much to eat, meal prep tips, how to cook for your family, have control over your food, and more as it teaches you how to lead a healthy lifestyle.
Fitness
Establishing a solid foundation of smart choices and healthy habits day after day will help you be less likely to give in to temporary cravings or to cut back on exercise. Someone once said it takes 21 days to create a habit. Other studies have shown it takes 3x as long. I don’t know which is true, but regardless, I do know that if you start now, you’ll begin to break your old habits and build new, healthy habits. One way to do this is to admit and identify the excuses you are making.
Why are you putting off exercise? Why are you not eating nutritious foods? Often times the answer is fear – fear of uncertainty, fear of success, fear of failure, or fear of change.
Is it a lack of will power? Is procrastination simply easier?
Our lives are full of commitments but we all have the same 24 hours in a day. The difference between those who are happy and content, and those who are not, is how we use those hours and how we manage our priorities.
Get rid of the excuses that don’t contribute to your well-being. Re-prioritize to build your confidence and regain true self control of your life.
It’s not enough to admit that you are responsible for your poor choices of food, drink, and inactivity. Make a change. You alone have this power, and taking the first step is the hardest. If you need help with this, hire a certified personal trainer and fitness nutrition coach to guide you to long-term success.
