THIS POST MAY CONTAIN AFFILATE LINKS. PLEASE READ MY DISCLOSURE FOR MORE INFO.
It’s not easy living a healthy lifestyle but it’s not really all that hard either.
The way I like to look at it is in regards to what type of lifestyle you want to live. Do you want to a fitness type of lifestyle? An active lifestyle? A specific eating routine or diet that revolves around your lifestyle? Or do you just want to simply start adopting healthier habits that you can incorporate into your lifestyle, no matter what kind of lifestyle that may be?
If you’re looking for the last option then you have come to the right place. I am by far no expert in what it means to live a healthy lifestyle, but I do know what it means to adopt specific habits and routines that make a difference for the better in your life. This includes habits such as making better choices when eating, ensuring that I’m drinking plenty of water, and much more.
In today’s post I’m going to share with you some tips that can help you start living a healthier life now without having to completely change your current lifestyle at all. Check it out below!
Related Posts: Get Fit & Healthy Fast with These 6 Health Tips!
Drink plenty of water
I know you probably hear this all the time and if you’ve been reading my blog for a while now you know that I preach this all the time. Water is so good for our bodies and our overall health. Some health benefits of drinking plenty of water throughout the day include clear skin, helps in regulating body temperature, it’s good for hair growth, it flushes body waste, and most importantly it’s good for our digestive health. This of course are just a few of the health benefits among the many, but I think you get the point.
If you want to be able to function better throughout the day, have plenty of energy, naturally fight fatigue, have regular bowl movements (sorry haha), and get a better sleep every night, then you need to be drinking water. Water is also known to work as a natural agent for losing weight. This means that even if you’re not the type who likes to workout religiously that’s fine. So long as you are drinking anywhere from 6-8 glasses of water a day you will still help your body lose unwanted weight. It might take time, but it will get the job done.
This is the easiest habit that you can incorporate into your lifestyle right now. A tip to help you drink more water throughout the day is to carry a water bottle with you everywhere you go. I personally have a water bottle that I keep in my car, that I keep by my bed, and one that I have on me throughout the day. This helps to ensure that I am drinking plenty of water and if for whatever reason I don’t have my usual water bottle on me, I’ve got options and no excuse to not continue drinking water.
Give it a try. It’s easier than you might think.
Related Posts: Lemon Water Vs. Good Old Plain Water. Which Should You Be Drinking More Of?
Exercise
This is something that I love to do mainly because I know that it works. You do not have to spend hours a day working out in order to improve your health. You don’t even need a gym membership to do this! All you need is 15-20 minutes a day and enough space in your home to get down and dirty. I workout every single day in the comfort of my own home and this is something that I have been doing consistently for a year now.
Of course, there are some advantages and disadvantages to working out at home versus the gym, but in all honestly those differences are mainly in regards to the type of equipment you have access to, and the amount of time you have to spare to get in a good workout. At home you’re not really limited to anything. You can always invest in your workout equipment if you would like to workout at home but want to have access to all the benefits of going to a gym, or you can just simply workout at home.
This is what I do. I just workout at home. Every month I either find videos on YouTube to workout to for the day, or I just do some of my favorite workout routines or moves. Usually I’ll spend on average 30 minutes a day working out and believe me this is more than enough time. You can make a commitment to living a healthier lifestyle by doing just that. If you’re in need of some workouts to help you get started with working out at home check out my 30-day workout calendar.
This calendar is packed with some of my favorite workouts that everyone can do no matter what your fitness level may be, that I do on a daily basis to help keep myself in shape while also improving other areas of my health. The best part about this calendar is that it can be used for any month/day throughout the year. All you have to do is download it onto your phone, or print it out and hang it up somewhere, where you will see it every day and commit to working out. Every workout will take you about 30 minutes to complete and then you’re done for the day!
Related Posts: Exercising Tips for Beginners Starting a Fitness or Wellness Journey
Adopt healthier food choices
This may be a struggle area for most of us, and for me personally this is by far the hardest. While exercising consistently and drinking plenty of water is a good start to living healthier, what will most certainly have a direct impact on your health are the changes you make in your diet. You may be familiar with the saying “you are what you eat”, and while this may not be literally true it does hold truth to it.
What we eat reflects in our health. If you eat junk food all day this shows in your skin, body fat composition, and energy levels. The same goes for if you eat fruits and vegetables regularly. What you eat will also have a direct impact on how old you look, and how fast you are able to transform your body when on a fitness journey. As you can imagine what you eat also influences your ability to lose weight and maintain a certain weight. So, while your diet is not the center focus of your health it does play a very vital role.
If you want to see desirable results changing your eating habits for the better is one of the first areas you will have to start. This doesn’t mean you have to give up all the foods that you love to eat, or that you can’t indulge in your guilty pleasures every once in a while. It also doesn’t mean that you have to adopt a diet, such as becoming vegan or cutting out red meat, in order to achieve your desired results. All that this means is that you will have to train yourself to make healthier choices.
So instead of grabbing that greasy burger and a large order of fires maybe make the decision to cook a veggie burger and sweet potato fires instead. It’s having the discipline to make little changes like this that will have a big impact on your health. It’s a hard one but if I can do it, I know that you can.
Related Posts: 6 Types of Foods That Are Good for Your Health and Jump Starting A Healthier Diet
Eat more homecooked meals
Just like adopting healthier food choices you might also want to consider cooking your meals more than you go out to eat or buy them from fast food restaurants. While doing so is not a perfect system and will not solve all your healthy lifestyle related problems, it can and will assist you in adopting the habit of cooking your food more. This is something that I have been making a habit of doing for the past year and I can personally say that I have seen a drastic change in my health.
Since I’ve decided to stop eating out as often and instead planning out my meals for the week, and then putting in the work of cooking it, I’ve noticed changes in my eating habits. For starters I don’t crave as much junk food as I once did, I have more energy to put into my workouts, I sleep better at night, and I’m more aware and conscious of what I’m putting into my body. Cooking my meals has also made me aware of how often I am eating fruits and vegetables throughout the day.
If cooking meals at home is not something you are use to, and you have a very limited choice of meals to choose from in your personal cookbook, I recommended doing one of two things (or both really). One, you can either find a ton of healthy recipes on Pinterest and cook them. What’s so great about this is that these recipes will tell you exactly what ingredients you need for the meal, how to cook it, and how long prep and cook time usually is. This is one way that I find all my healthy recipes to cook at home and what I love most about it is that it helps me expand the type of meals that I am able to cook.
The other thing you can do is invest in a cookbook. Much like Pinterest these cookbooks are filled with a ton of different meals that will list the ingredients and clear instructions how to cook them. Two cookbooks that I would recommend is Tia Mowry’s A Whole New You, and Chrissy Teigen’s Cravings. Both of these books are filled with traditional foods that most families love and eat, but they just have a healthier spin on it. It’s a great place to start with cooking healthier meals but still eating all the foods that you love.
It’s also the number one area I wish I would have started when I decided to start living healthier, I would have seen desired results a lot faster. But it’s all gravy, the point is that you eventually get to this stage of your health, which I promise you will.
Related Posts: 10 Natural Ways to Boost Your Immune System
Do some yoga
I love yoga and for a long time I wasn’t into it until I started to teach myself how to do it differently. Sounds strange I know but hear me out.
I use to treat yoga as something to do in order to calm myself down. While this is a great self-care activity that you can do to help center yourself, yoga is also a great way to workout, which is something that I didn’t understand in the beginning. For the longest I would only do yoga whenever I felt like I needed calm myself down after a stressful day, and I would do it with the intention of just getting through the session. It wasn’t until I started to do yoga with the intention of strengthening my body that I began to understand the positive health benefits that yoga has to offer.
Yoga is great for improving your flexibility, strengthening your muscles, improving your energy, losing weight, improving your stamina (it’s a great form of cardio), and it even helps you learn how to protect your joints and body. These are just some of the few benefits of doing yoga and once I started teaching myself that this is what yoga is intended for, I started to engage in it differently.
Engaging it in with this mindset has not only helped me make it a part of my workout routine at least once a month, but it has also helped me in maintaining my level of fitness. I consider myself to be an intermediate fitness person, which means that most moves I can do but I can’t do them for extended periods of time (depending on what the move is, especially if it’s cardio). Doing yoga has helped me maintain this regularity when it comes to my fitness journey, which has helped me live a much healthier lifestyle now than when I was only doing yoga to eliminate stress out of my life.
Give it a try. The results may just surprise you!
Related Posts: 5 Health Tips to Help You Stay Healthy with A Busy Schedule
Conclusion
You can start living a much healthier life right not. To do so doesn’t mean that you have to adopt a ridiculously strict diet, commit to a ridiculous amount of workout hours in a day, deprive yourself of your favorite foods and snacks, or even change your current lifestyle. All that this means is that you can start living a healthier life by making small changes where they matter most.
These changes are in regards to:
- how much water you drink in a day
- how often you exercise
- the food choices you make throughout the day
- how often you are eating at home versus eating out
- and other wellness related activities you are engaging outside of your normal wellness routine, like doing yoga at least once a month
Of course, what I have listed here are just a few suggestions that are a great place to get started. However, there are other areas where you can start making a change now to begin your healthier lifestyle. Again, to live a healthier life does not mean you change everything about the lifestyle that you currently have. It just means you start making little changes in areas that will have the biggest impact on your health and desired transformation.
If I can do it so can you. So, start making those little changes now. Your future self will thank you for it!
-Xo
Kimora