We all want to get healthier. There is a reason each New Year comes with a surge in gym memberships, healthy food or meal plan signups and so forth. We have this desire to be our best, but the problem is we go for this all or nothing mentality. The real challenge to living a healthier life is adapting healthier choices into our current habits and routines. For example, if you need to improve how you eat and cut down on sugar, you do not switch from soda to water in a single day. Instead, switch out half your soda intake with water and the other half with diet soda. Diet soda may not be healthy, but it will bridge the gap to becoming less dependent on soda and help you start a healthier lifestyle.
Let’s look at some other ways you can improve your health without completely overhauling your life immediately:
- Better sleep: People think that the key to fixing sleep problems is to get more hours of sleep. For most of us, that’s not an option. So, what can you do? How about improving the quality of the sleep you are getting? Changing your mattress to a system that controls temperature, allows you to adjust to accommodate body type and preferred sleep positions, cut down on bacteria and toxins that lower the air quality while we sleep can have you feeling like you grabbed an extra hour or two of sleep a night.
- Food preparation: For years we were told to eat our vegetables. However, we recently discovered that we were wasting food as the way we were cooking things was taking away important nutrients and vitamins. Not everyone loves the taste of broccoli, but if you can cook it in a way that makes it more delicious but doesn’t take away from the health benefits it provides, eating broccoli will become more of a routine in your diet.
- Make exercising fun: You may not have an hour to go to the gym, but why does it have to be the gym and why does it have to be an hour? Taking the stairs at work can give you a pretty solid workout and get the blood going. Walking is also the most underrated form of exercise. Do you have daily conversations on the phone with a friend? Why not go for a walk while you’re talking to them? Playing basketball, swimming, playing catch or even doing some gardening are all forms of exercise that people enjoy but do not think of it as actual exercise.
- Water quality: We are now investing in water filters and even alkaline water because we realize that tap or bottled water is no longer the safest and healthiest for us to drink. Similar to food preparation, if you are going to show the commitment to drinking water throughout the day, shouldn’t you get the benefits of that commitment?
- Just breathe: The air we breathe is rarely something we concern ourselves with, but it needs to be. Many of the respiratory problems we battle are based on the quality of the air we are breathing every day. Healthier air means we can feel healthier and more energetic. It also makes it easier for our body to breathe, meaning we are not putting stress on our body to get the oxygen it needs.
These 5 factors to a healthier life do not require a major lifestyle overhaul. They are simple adjustments you can make that will help you lose weight, sleep better, feel healthier and more energetic as well as help your body’s immune system. Stop investing in things that require an unrealistic commitment and start making the simple changes that will make a big difference.
