Effortless Ways to Start Your Healthy Lifestyle

It’s always uncomfortable whenever you try something new. Especially when it’s a healthy lifestyle that requires completely changing your diet and exercise routines. Everyone wants to be healthy and fit, but only very few can survive the tough habits it takes to start a healthy lifestyle.

Research has already proven that the key to living a healthy lifestyle is making subtle changes in your daily diet, exercising and managing your stress. So instead of eating 5 slices of pizzas with no plan to exercise later, cut it down to 2 – 3 slices with a plan to burn it off later. So for those worried about the idea of sticking to a strict diet of salad and spinach for the rest of your life can rest assured.

Just make small adjustments that eventually add up into a whole. Instead of eating an entire pizza, only eat half. Instead of eating fried food, go for baked. A major change I’ve been implementing is drinking water instead of soda when I’m at a restaurant. As you get comfortable making those small and yet easy adjustments, you find it easier reaching a healthy lifestyle.

Adapting a healthy lifestyle is always a possible aim to reach, but it’s soul crushing if you go unprepared. It’s not the process of starting a diet or exercising that’s difficult. Ironically, that’s normally the easiest part. After watching a motivational video, setting a New Years Resolution, or influenced by someone else, most people get the motivation to change their lives.

However, without a proper plan, you eventually return back to your old habits after a couple of weeks. And maybe like me and so many other people, you fail to keep the healthy lifestyle you originally wanted.

Perhaps you suddenly wanted to become a sexy beast after looking at a magazine and decided to drop junk food altogether. Sure, you do good for a few weeks by eating nothing but veggies, but after smelling the scent of freshly baked pizza and fried chicken, you break your temptations and devour them all like a vampire. Before you know it, you’re back on the same boat eating cheeseburgers with a low self-esteem. And if it wasn’t junk food, I’m sure it was something just the same that you stopped doing simply because of a lack of motivation.

Which is why after getting some advice from a few fitness leaders to learn their best habits, I picked up a few hot tips that can actually help you. These are the simple ways you can accomplish a healthy lifestyle:

1. Include Fruits and Vegetables in your diet

Cheeseburgers, pizza, milk shakes, and all that beautiful stuff are amazing to eat. It’s hard to imagine life without them. But remember to include vegetables and fruits into your meals at least once a day. They’re beneficial when starting a healthy lifestyle because not only do they keep you full longer throughout the day, they help you avoid sugar crashes in the middle of the day.

Back at a time I was shamefully addicted to energy drinks, although it enhanced my performance for the beginning of the morning, I found myself nearly passing out towards lunch.

Now I’m sure you’ve probably heard the common facts that vegetables can lower your chances of getting cancer and delay your aging process. But facts alone aren’t that convincing because we’ve heard them all since we were children. Instead, we’re going to cover some easy ways to include them into our meals.

Such as myself, I’m sure the idea of including a piece of broccoli or carrot with a cheeseburger sucks. It doesn’t sound good and it just makes you want to throw the meal out of the window altogether. So let’s act as artists and reveal a creative way to spice your vegetable lifestyle.

Grilling: You don’t have to eat your vegetables or fruits raw style. Simply grilling some green beans, bell peppers, onions, corn, asparagus, or potatoes can spice your meal up for a tasty treat.

And it’s not difficult either. For the most part, all it takes is putting some olive oil on whatever vegetable you have in mind along with whatever spices you prefer and lay them out on the grill until they start steaming. Each vegetable will take its own timeframe before it’ll finishes, but a website I recommend is Pinterest Grilled Vegetables.

As for those still not convinced, I’m sure these pictures below might convince you otherwise:

Yummy, right? A good read to guide you towards a healthy lifestyle is The Whole30: The 30-Day Guide to Total Health and Food Freedom

2. Limit That Junk Food

Eating junk food or having junk food in your home or workplace can really sabotage your diet plan and your aim to stick to a healthy lifestyle. If possible, throw out everything that’s oily, sugary and fatty to save yourself. This doesn’t mean you don’t have to stop eating junk food forever, but prevent yourself from having an easy gateway to it. Because one night when you’re feeling extra hunger, you’re going to make the mistake of looking at that leftover bag of chips and shamefully eat it.

Since we’re on the topic, let’s just remind you that junk food can increase the risk of cancer along with the aging process. But let’s look realistically at the situation and not fool ourselves. Chances are, you’re occasionally going to want some ice cream, chips, and something greasy. You’ll have to be a healthy saint if you managed to somehow to cut out everything that’s for bad you.

The main idea you’ll need to incorporate is that by cutting your consumption of junk food by at least half, you’ll find a major difference in your energy. That means instead of eating something unhealthy for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, just eat something unhealthy for lunch and dinner. And as your self-discipline increases, you can manage yourself to only eat something unhealthy for either lunch or dinner.

After I quit being solely dependent on microwave pizzas and processed chips, I noticed an increased in energy almost immediately within the next couple of days. Exercising became easier to maintain past thirty minutes and I had more energy than I did before.

Thus, you don’t have to quit your delicious bag of chips, just make it more difficult to grab onto. That means avoid buying junk food to store in your home. Instead, buy some fruits to snack on whenever you get attacked by those hunger urges. And if you do decide to buy some junk food to hold onto, make an effort to get the smaller size.

If you want to know some hot information about what you should be mindful about eating, here are 13 Healthy foods that aren’t really that healthy.

Must Read Book: The Clean Eating Cookbook & Diet: Over 100 Healthy Whole Food Recipes & Meal Plans

3. Exercise You Lazy Bum

By now, you know exercising is a must need habit to bring into your life. But before imagining yourself going to the gym to do something you’re probably not excited about, let’s take a different approach.

Exercising doesn’t just mean constantly running, lifting weights, or doing the insanity workout. Exercising in its best form for the average person is simply being actively engaged on a daily basis. That means you should walk more often and move your body as much as possible throughout the day. Instead of sitting at your desk, stand. Instead of driving to a store only a mile away, walk.

This all relates to the 80/20 principle, which states that your best results originates from what you do 80% of the time rather the 20%. If you only exercise 20% of the time, it’ll hardly make a major difference if you’re lazy the other 80%.

Think of it like mixing two different drinks together. If you pour 80% orange juice and 20% apple juice, you’re going to taste more of the orange juice rather than the apple. So if you want a good taste of apple juice, switch it around so it stands at 80%.

Now let’s move onto the facts,

If you exercise daily, it can be advantageous in following ways:

 It stabilizes your blood pressure.

 It decreases the cholesterol in your body.

 It develops your lean muscle.

 It improves your eye sight and bone density.

 It has been proven that people who exercise daily have a much lesser rate of problem related to bones and joints.

4. Get Some Sleep You Night Owl

As tempting as it might seem to stay up throughout the night, it’s only hurting your chance to maintain a proper healthy lifestyle. Think of your body like your phone battery. Every time your phone battery reaches 7%, you plug your charger into it for only 20 minutes, assuming that’s all the time you need. And although your phone will probably reach 30% battery life, you’ll find it eventually reaching 7% again shortly.

Remember, sleep rejuvenates your mind, body and soul. The next time you feel a raid of negative emotions, unmotivated, and simply enthusiastic about life, consider sleeping an extra two hours at night.

Your body is a machine and when it gets overwhelmed, it eventually crashes, sending your productivity down the hill. Rest with an extra two hours of sleep a few nights throughout the week. It if helps, nap during the day for 30 minutes. Find some manner to fit sleeping into your schedule that you can rejuvenate your positive energy and feel better.

Sleep helps you feel more alert because it removes the effects of a fatigue body. Adequate sleep is a key ingredient to a healthy lifestyle because it benefits your heart, weight, mind, and more. And if you find yourself sleeping too much, here are a few (17 to be exact) useful tips to make you an early riser.

5. Get your relatives and friends on the same boat

I’ll be frank. It sometimes suck when you’re the only one at the dinner table eating a handful of salad while everyone else is eating nachos and wings. It sucks when you have to go to the gym while your friends stay at home playing Super Smash Bros on the Wii. And after a built-up of those sucky emotions, you find yourself quitting a healthy lifestyle in exchange of playing Super Mario while eating some leftover cheese sticks.

Thus bring in the importance of dragging your friends and family into your plan. Working together with them can make things easier for you because you know you have a group of supporters. It makes the idea of quitting more intimidating because unlike before, you know you have people watching over you. You’ll feel guiltier if you see the disappointment in Sally’s eyes when you tell her you stopped going to the gym or you’re back to a sole diet of pudding.

And if you have someone who’s willing to suffer the same lifestyle choices such as you, it’ll boost your motivation to continue. When you want to exercise but need support, a friend can help you make it to the gym. And if you both need some useful tips on running, check out How to Start Running: A Beginner’s Guide.

6. Start slow, stay slow and remain steady

Alter your bad habits and be conscious of your routines. Your perspectives and how you go about them are what determines your healthy results. You can have the best exercise plan, the ultimate diet handbook, and a handful of people cheering you on, but without sustaining a positive outlook on yourself, you’re bound to fail.

What? But how you may ask.

At the beginning of people healthy journeys, they often get frustrated because they expect rapid results and when they don’t see any significant changes in their physique, they give up and revert back to their old routines. Thus, you must start slowly and not focus on results. Don’t even expect to lose a pound in the first month.

You’re not going to lose 10 pounds the first week you start exercising and eating right. You probably won’t even lose half a pound. Focus on building an exercise and eating healthier habit because that reduces the constant need to check your body status. By the time you develop a clear easy routine you can follow, you’ll naturally find yourself slimming.

It’s almost like the Hare and the Tortoise story. If you start off your healthy lifestyle at a quick pace, expecting quick results, you’re going to be disappointed because the insane realities of getting there so fast. And if you did reach the some kind of results at a fast pace, you’ll eventually grow arrogant and eventually grow back your old lazy habits, thus returning back to how you were before. However, if you just continue moving along that road without focusing entirely on the results, you’ll find yourself at the finish line with long results.

Start with small modification in your diet and exercise routinely for around 15 – 30 minutes. Begin eating healthier by replacing bacon for oatmeal, and chips for salads.

For more tips on the best ways to maintain a positive outlook on life, check out 5 Simple Habits to Help you Love Yourself.

7. Drink lots and lots of water

Water’s good. Water’s great. I can’t think of a single reason you shouldn’t drink water unless it’s poison or come from a suspicious river. I can count more than 100 benefits as to why you should consume a gallon of water right now. Some of them are as follows:

• It assists in weight loss.

• It reduces the stress on your kidneys and liver by flushing the waste out of the body

• It enhances your mood.

• It helps your kidneys to work efficiently and properly.

• It revitalizes your lost energy and helps athletes recover from being fatigue.

• It keeps you alert and vigilant.

• It prevents you from certain types of cancer and diseases.

• Skin glows if it is properly hydrated. There is no use of special lotions and creams to keep your skin glowing if you hydrate your body regularly.

• Research says that people who has adequate intake of water don’t suffer from early problems of bones and joints.

Getting past the fountain of benefits, drinking more water throughout your day really will make a difference in your energy. Before you drink your usual round of coffee in the morning, switch it up with some coffee instead. Before you order a soda at a restaurant, switch it up for some lemon water. I’m not trying to convert you into a drink only water type of person, but make an effort to drink at least 12 glasses of water a day.

8. Flush out negativity from yourself and be happy

You ever noticed that the concept of mental health is often missing from public health debates even though it’s a critical problem for everyone. Especially children. People normally don’t just go crazy one day and begin harming the most amount of people they can. People just don’t suddenly choke the first random person they see. It takes a gradual buildup of intense and negative emotions before a person snaps and raise hell upon the world.

Having a healthy lifestyle doesn’t just mean keeping your body under together. It also includes your mind as well. It includes the way you view yourself throughout the course of your day. What you’re thinking about throughout the day. It’s positive thinking that acts as a necessity to your physical health.

Listen to the thoughts that pop into your head and destroy the negative ones by immediately doing something positive and being active at it. If you’re thinking about the time you failed a test, get up and take a walk outside while listening to your favorite song. If you got rejected, clean your room to prevent yourself from thinking you’re worthless. What usually helps me when I’m feeling down or lazy is cleaning my home or washing the dishes.

Your mind thinks about what you’re currently doing, which then reflects on your emotions. When you’re actively engaging your body you’re focusing your mind to other activities that eventually influence your emotions.

But if you’re searching for the best methods to be a mentally strong person, check out the 17 Laws for Mentally Strong People.