Sticking To Good Habits Is Key To A Healthy Lifestyle

Nobody plans on living an unhealthy lifestyle. Most people try to do their best to live healthily, but things like work, family, chores, etc. lead to stress and exhaustion. As you probably know, it can be hard to carve out the time to exercise, get enough sleep, eat healthy while still taking care of all your responsibilities. It’s become all too common for people to accept feeling sick, tired, or depressed.

Luckily, living a healthy lifestyle doesn’t require a lot of money or even a ton of time. However, it does require cultivating good habits and sticking to them. While it might be difficult, especially in the beginning, the longer you keep following a healthy lifestyle, the easier it will become.

Healthy Lifestyle Equals All Positive Benefits

Before you start changing everything in your life, you should take a moment to establish your baseline. These numbers can help you get a handle on your current status. You’ll also want to track this information often so you can see your progress. Some of the baseline numbers you should measure are:

Weight and waist - while your weight doesn’t always reflect your health, it can give you clues on whether you’re more at risk of developing certain conditions such as heart disease, arthritis, cancer, and more. Step on a scale and then use a calculator to measure your BMI, which also takes your height into account. Of course, BMI isn’t perfect as people like bodybuilders will measure in as ‘overweight’ for their height. After that, measure your waist circumference. Men should not have a circumference any larger than 40 inches, while women should be below 36 inches. Excess fat around the midsection means you are more likely to develop diabetes and heart disease.

Blood numbers - Most people only get their blood pressure taken but forget about getting their cholesterol and glucose levels measures. Even if you have normal blood pressure, you can still have high cholesterol, which puts you at more risk of developing heart disease. Good blood pressure is less than 120/80, good total cholesterol is under 200 mg/dL, and your fasting blood glucose should be less than 100mg/dL.
Mood - keeping track of your mood is just as important as tracking your physical health. If you are continually feeling depressed, agitated, stressed, or overwhelmed, it might be time to schedule an appointment with a mental health counselor. Poor mental health can sap your energy and passion and can even raise your risk of developing heart disease.

When you decide to lead a healthy lifestyle, it shouldn’t be about getting that perfect body. You might never look like a swimsuit model or body lifter since you probably won’t have the time or money to devote to eating and working out exactly as they do. Instead, you should focus on the long-term benefits that a living healthy will bring you.

Longer Life

By eating healthy and taking care of your body, you’ll improve your overall health and well-being. A study found that adopting five healthy habits could extend your life expectancy by 12-14 years. All you need to do is:

Eat a diet high in plants and low in fats
Exercise at a moderate to vigorous level for several hours a week
Maintain a healthy body weight
Don’t smoke
Don’t consume more than one alcoholic beverage a day

Not only can these five simple habits increase your lifespan, but it can also reduce your risk of developing chronic diseases such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and cancer.

The best part is that it is never too late to change. You can start leading a healthy lifestyle in your 20s or as later as your 50s. While it’s better to adopt a healthy lifestyle early on in life as it will be easier to follow it as you get older, you still receive substantial benefits even if you make these lifestyle changes later in life.

Look Happier

Healthy Lifestyle Improves Your Overall Mood

A healthy lifestyle can reduce your stress and anxiety, which in turn improves your overall mood. Have you ever noticed that getting a good night’s sleep puts you in a much better mood the next day? That’s because sleep deprivation increases activity in the amygdala - the emotional response center of your brain. When short on sleep, the amygdala goes into overdrive, causing people to react more strongly to situations. It’s why you might find yourself snapping or crying more often when you haven’t gotten enough sleep. Once you get a good night’s sleep, your mood tends to even out. However, if you struggle with insomnia often, it could lead to depression.

Luckily, another aspect of a healthy lifestyle involves exercise. Not only does exercise help improve your sleep quality, but it can also improve your overall mood. Working out promotes many changes in your brain, including neural growth, reduced inflammation, and new activity patterns that encourage feelings of well-being. It encourages your brain to release endorphins, a chemical that helps relieve stress and pain. Studies have shown that exercise helped decrease people’s odds of becoming depressed by 26 percent.

Confidence

When you start feeling better in your body, you will gain more confidence. Maintaining a fit body can boost your self-esteem and will also push you to continue your good habits. If you’re keeping a journal, you can see how far you have come from the beginning and also see how much work you have put into building up a healthy lifestyle over the course of even a few weeks.

This confidence can spill into other parts of your life besides your health. When you feel good about your accomplishments, you’ll be more confident at work and with your friends and loved ones. You might even take on some projects and/or hobbies that you didn’t think you could achieve because it seemed too hard.

Become A Role Model

Once you start feeling and looking better, you’ll l likely inspire others to do the same. Your friends and family might start seeking your advice on how to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Every time you go to the gym or eat a healthy meal, you are modeling positive behavior not only for your peers but for the younger generation as well such as your own children, nieces, nephews, and cousins.

Even if you don’t intend to be a role model, you never know who in your vicinity is watching you. It might be your downstairs neighbor or maybe even someone at the gym you go to. Whoever it is, there will be someone at the other end of the room who will be inspired to make changes in their life.

Look Younger

Besides getting in better shape, leading a healthy lifestyle also makes you look younger. You will have plenty of energy thanks to a nutritional diet, exercise, and enough sleep. Getting rid of processed food, excess salt, and simple carbs from your diet can have a huge influence on how your skin and hair look. You’ll notice that you have clearer skin and shinier hair. Getting enough sleep reduces the dark circles under your eyes and also helps your body heal itself from the day.

Looking younger isn’t just about your skin or hair though, it’s about how you carry yourself. A good diet and exercise can help stave off arthritis, keep you limber, and make you stronger. If you mix in exercises like yoga, you’ll also have improved flexibility and balance, which means fewer chances of falling and seriously injuring yourself.

Sleep

There are three main elements for healthy living. One of the most important but often forgotten one is sleep. Around 51 percent of adults worldwide don’t get enough sleep with 80 percent using the weekends to catch up on lost sleep during the week. There are a lot of reasons why people don’t get the 7-9 hours of sleep every night, but the most common include:

Longer work hours - many adults are working over the standard 40-hour workweek. Combine that with long commute time, family obligations, and chores, the average person is going to bed well past midnight.
Stress - there are a lot of stressors in today’s world from work to bill payments to relationship issues. All of these issues can keep you up at night, leading to a poor night’s sleep. A bad night of sleep can lead to stress, which leads to another night of bad sleep. This cycle can be incredibly hard to break unless you get to the root of the issue.
Technology - as convenient as technology is when it comes to getting information and entertainment quickly, it also wreaks havoc on your circadian rhythm. The blue light emanating from your device hinders the release of melatonin, the hormone that signals sleepiness. While many devices now have a blue light filter, it’s still a good idea to avoid technology one or two hours before bed.

In order to get out of your bad sleep habits, it’s important to improve your sleep hygiene. That means:

Going to sleep and waking up at the same time every day. That includes weekends
Making sure your bedroom is conducive to sleeping so making sure it’s a dark and cool environment
Removing any distractions from the bedroom
Setting up a regular bedtime routine
Avoiding any other activity besides sleep and sex in the bedroom. So no watching movies, eating, etc.

Diet

Most people know that a healthy diet is full of fruits and vegetables. However, most adults don’t actually eat enough servings of fruits or vegetables. Instead, people turn to meals heavy in carbs and protein. While these aren’t necessarily bad for, they don’t provide your body with all of the vitamins and nutrients it needs to stay healthy.

Luckily, it’s easy to add more servings of fruits and vegetables to your diet. Instead of reaching for a potato chip or candy, replace these snacks with fruits and vegetables. Increase your portions of vegetable sides at dinner or have a side salad with your main meal. Instead of eating a sandwich, grab a salad. In the beginning, you’ll need to make a conscious effort to eat healthier, but as you continue following a healthy diet you’ll find it easier as time passes.

Exercise / Go Outside

Be Active and Get Daily Exercise For A Healthy Lifestyle

The last key component to a healthy lifestyle is exercise. Most experts suggest getting at least 150 minutes of moderately intensive exercise a week, that’s 30 minutes, five days a week. If you don’t have a 30-minute block of time, you can always break it up into 5-10 minute chunks throughout the day.

Working out isn’t just about pumping iron or running. If you hate the idea of running for no reason or just lifting weights, then choose an activity that you enjoy. The more you like the activity, the more you will stick with it. Instead of running try hiking, swimming, or biking. If you prefer something that’s a bit more engaging, try a sport like tennis or ultimate frisbee. Another great activity is dancing as it’s a great workout and improves your balance and posture. Regardless of what activity you choose, the point is to get your body moving every day.

Embrace A Healthy Lifestyle To Look and Feel Your Best

Leading a healthy lifestyle isn’t something that’s out of reach for most people. Initially, it might seem like you’ll have to overhaul your entire life, but you can and should make these changes gradually. You want to ease yourself into eating more vegetables, exercising more, getting more sleep. This builds up your willpower ‘muscle.’ When you first start, you want to pick up a habit that is easy enough that you don’t need the motivation to do it. It should be so easy, you can’t say no. Rather than doing 50 pushups, start with 5. If that seems like it’s too much, work backward to find the number that you know you can do consistently. Instead of cutting out all sugary drinks immediately, bring the number down by one or two. Once you’ve gotten used to that, increase your habit in very small ways. Little gains add up and by the end of the month, you’ll be much further along than if you tried to do everything at once and gave up.

Leading a healthy lifestyle requires time and patience. However, the benefits far outweigh any potential negatives in the beginning. Once you’ve gone down the path of healthy living, you’ll wonder how you ever lived before it. You’ll feel happier, healthier, stronger, and more focused in your life.

Shana Thompson is a full time professional writer and editor. Shana has worked extensively in the fields of content marketing, on-page and off-page SEO (guest posts, backlink acquisition), and creative writing. As an experienced pro content writer, Shana has worked on several magazines, publishing companies and marketing agencies. Many recent projects have included everything from nutrition and health services, where a lot of research and citations were needed, to writing about health, sustainable, eco-friendly products.

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