The small habits we accumulate over time shape our quality of life.
Something as simple as a cigarette puff can turn into a whole addiction and similarly, embracing a healthy lifestyle can lead to a more fulfilling life.
The challenge with embracing a healthy lifestyle is, it’s not always easy to do.
Most people don’t like the hassle of blending healthy smoothies all the time and cooking meals that barely have any flavor, plus, working out consistently is really hard.
Going through the cycle where you stay healthy for a couple of weeks or months then backsliding is also frustrating and the only solution is to figure out how you can keep up with everything for the sake of your health.
The process of making healthy living your lifestyle is a learning curve and these are some tips you could use.
1. Customize a routine that fits your lifestyle
A healthy lifestyle isn’t always about doing exactly what someone else is doing. You have lots of information online, which is good but it’s still important to understand what your needs are.
If you’ve been following someone online and their routine involves working out twice a day, check how you can make it once a day if that’s what you’re comfortable with.
This is essential because you should love your own routine. That is more likely to help you stay consistent instead of trying to force your routine to look like someone else’s when it clearly doesn’t fit into your schedule.
The best part about being healthy is feeling sexy. You start to love those abs and curves coming in and that’s the prize that most of us look forward to.
However, it’s not enough to just focus on that if you want to make your efforts count. If you obsess over this, you will always want more even when you have already done enough.
3. Embrace all the benefits
An unhealthy lifestyle blocks you from seeing all the negative changes that have been happening in the background. It affects everything from the health of your skin, your sleep quality, your mental health and you might be blaming everything else while the real culprit is your lifestyle.
Once you make some adjustments, you will start to see improvements. Use those small joys to motivate yourself and that is how you slowly make a healthy lifestyle a part of you.
4. Leave the unnecessary pressure behind
There are many mistakes that we’ve all made when it comes to living healthy. People sometimes think that they need to starve themselves in order to lose weight and some even become so addicted to the rush of being healthy that they count every single calorie or get anxious if they skip a few days of working out.
What you should do is research on some of those unnecessary pressures you’ve been putting on yourself like skipping meals instead of simply choosing healthy meals.
That extra stress might be affecting your consistency so that is something that you might need to adjust.
5. Take small steps
Never underestimate the power of small steps. We often want to instantly transform ourselves into who we want to be and that ‘right now’ mentality never works, especially long term.
The goal should be to do better every day and to keep trying.
