10 Tips for a Healthy Lifestyle

 

10 Tips for a Healthy Lifestyle

I’d like to share some basic tips and resources for how to maintain your healthy lifestyle, body weight, and overall well-being while staying home and engaging in social distancing. 

1. Eat Mindfully.

So many of us were raised to ‘finish everything on your plate’. Unfortunately, what this did was make us eat according to our eyes and not according to our stomachs. Ideally, you want to stop eating when you are satisfied, or when the hunger is gone, and not eat until you are full – or until the plate is empty. Help yourself to do this by serving yourself a smaller portion, eating more slowly, and checking in with yourself throughout the meal to ask ‘am I still hungry?

2. Manage Your Hunger.

Don’t let yourself become too hungry. If you describe your hunger level by saying I’m starving, then you’ve let things go too far. Feeling like you’re ‘starving’ will lead to overeating and loss of impulse control.

3. Shop Regularly.

If you want to eat healthily, you need to have healthy foods on hand to make that goal as easy as possible. This also avoids those last-minute trips to the grocery store when you’re over-hungry and end up giving in to unhealthy impulse purchases.

4. Allow Indulgences.

Your eating doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be better than what it was to achieve results. So, if you are currently giving yourself 14 treats a week, then scale it down to 10, then 8 then 5, etc. until you get to a number that allows you to get the results you are after. When you become more discriminating about how you ‘spend’ these indulgences you choose the treats that you enjoy the most and avoid the ones that just happen to be available that you don’t really enjoy.

5. Ask Yourself What is Triggering My Craving?

I believe that craving is your body’s way of talking to you. What is it saying? Are you bored, tired, stressed? If so, treat the underlying trigger with what your body really needs, and don’t treat your craving with unhealthy food that will only make you feel worse afterward. Keeping a food record and recording how you feel as well as what you eat can help to identify your triggers.

6. Be Active Throughout the Day.

While a good workout in the morning is a great way to start your day, the benefits don’t carry you through a fully sedentary day. Make an effort to get up every hour.

7. Schedule Activity in Your Week.

Use your calendar or scheduler to make appointments for yourself to do a workout, swim, or exercise class. If you are just waiting for time to appear when you can work out, then it’s likely that won’t happen.

8. Exercise on More Days than You Don’t.

There are 7 days in the week, which means, you should be active for 4 of them at least. Don’t wait until Thursday to start either. Try to get at least 2 workouts in by Wednesday.

9. Make Exercise Fun.

I think the time in my life when I was most active was when I played on a hockey team, was in a running group, and had a run partner. I felt like being active wasn’t just exercise for the sake of exercising, it was my social life too. If you are choosing a person to be your exercise partner, make sure to choose someone that will support you and not hold you back.

10. Try Something New.

You never know if your next favorite activity is out there waiting to be discovered. Want to try martial art? Join a hiking club? Learn to salsa? You don’t have to do the same-old, same-old. Don’t be afraid to step out of your comfort zone.