We are halfway through 2019 and looks like we are all good so far. Are we?
The past decade has seen many health trends hitting the sky through the internet and intriguing people to think which one to adopt. The most popular ones are the low carb diets like Keto, wearable technology and wellness drinks.
Low carb diets like Keto, are a hit for the people looking forward to instant or rapid weight loss. Weight loss has also been gaining momentum, given the alarming growth in a vast range of diseases like diabetes and obesity.
Another scion to the weight loss journeys is intense workouts and exercises. These include Power Yoga and Circuit training that requires a little bit of assistance from technology in the form of wearable gadgets. For example, the motion sensors that count calories lost help in determining the calorie count to track weight loss.
Wellness drinks is another superfood category that has become popular among nutrition and health enthusiasts. Ditching the favourite cola and soda for maintaining good health is a decision taken by most people in the past few years. These drinks include Noni juice, Kombucha and Chia seed beverages.
Every new year is further inception and a chance to break old patterns and change unhealthy habits. You might have missed making proper health choices for the year or must have been carried away because of work and other reasons.
Why should January always give you a desire to improve your health and wellness? You could do it at any time of the year! This article is a subtle reminder that it is better late than never.
Harness that motivation and start making long-lasting, compelling changes that will improve your mental and physical health. Here are a few key suggestions to cultivate a healthier lifestyle for the rest of 2019 and beyond.
Abandon Resolutions
Yes, you heard that right! The problem with resolutions is that we don’t often follow them throughout. The word resolution itself is so temporary in connotation, that it makes us want to support it in the beginning, but also loses its attention spark halfway through the time period.
To make long-lasting lifestyle changes, a temporary decision does not work. If you are going to impart new habits into your life, make sure they’re going to be there for good.
These habits that you decide to make a part of your life have to be stepping stones in a better and healthier lifestyle for them to stick around. This means, not giving up when you have a small hindrance, a travel plan or peer influence even during times of stress.
In general, they say it takes 21 days for anything to become a habit. But here we are talking about significant health decisions that have to last for the lifetime. To make this happen, cultivate many such healthy habits to form the lifestyle of your choice.
Life-long well being can only be attained when these habits are followed devotedly.
Mental And Physical Health – Both Are Important
It is not rocket science to figure out what food is right and what food is bad. Since childhood, we have been educated about what is healthy and what is not, even if they are other habits.
The routine dialogue goes about saying – drink plenty of water, exercise for thirty minutes in a day, sleep for an average of seven to eight hours and eat a balanced diet. Many of us also try to follow these golden rules of a healthy lifestyle, but nobody talks about how much is enough.
Some key factors that determine good health are smoking habits, average BMI of 18- 22.5, having five servings of vegetables and fruits and exercising at least thirty minutes five times a week.
There are a lot of people who do all these things regularly. But there is more to good health than these things because these are just the physical attributes taken care of.
A significant role is played by mental health in keeping things on track. For example, a glitch in your good mood might increase your appetite or make you want to smoke. These habits are also impacted by stress and anxiety from time to time.
What Works For You
A lot of people make mistakes while taking decisions about their food habits or work. These people miss out the primary factor – professional help – while making these decisions.
This often backfires and worsens their condition overall. Your personality plays a crucial role in determining your healthy lifestyle. The best way to understand this is from past mistakes, allergies, and identifying your body type.
Body types are usually three – Ectomorph, Endomorph, and Mesomorph
Ectomorph
People with lean and long body structure, with difficulty in building muscles. Gaining weight for Ectomorphs is a challenging task. Their metabolism is fast, and they burn calories faster than others. Therefore, skinny people often tend to eat a lot and still they remain slim.
For gaining weight, they require vast amounts of calorie intakes. Thus you must have seen trainers in the gym asking them to consume banana shakes and other high-calorie drinks and diet in order to gain more weight. Because of their ability to lose fat quickly getting back in shape is also a cake walk for them.
Endomorph
People with prominent body structure, often pear-shaped, with high body fat, and high tendency to store body fat.
Endomorphs, unlike Ectomorphs, gain weight quickly. It is due to the body composition that consists of more fat and fewer muscles. Highly abundant protein intake is suggested to people with this body type, and a combination of cardio and weights is recommended for perfectly toned body shape.
Mesomorph
People with muscular and well-built body structure, with a high metabolism and responsive muscle cells. Mesomorphs respond best to weight training exercises and are often considered an ideal body type in modelling too.
Gains in body shape can be seen easily in the early days of exercises itself but these people tend to gain weight in a speedier way. For them, to a perfect blend of cardio and muscle training works for a perfectly toned body.
Every body type has a different way of dealing with when it comes to diets and workout regimes. A self-introspection involving your distractions quiet moments, successful changes and injuries, keeping in mind your body type, gives you an understanding as to what is possible and what is not for your future lifestyle decisions.
Disrupt and change unhealthy habits.
This could be a difficult one because who doesn’t like comfort zones? Everyone has or had at least one habit that is evidently not good for health. These need not necessarily be harming ones like smoking, but could also refer to the ones like biting nails or having too much fast food.
Evaluating current habits and genuinely accepting the flawed ones, is the first step to get rid of them. It might seem too much to suddenly stopping these things. Start with ditching them for a defined period and give yourself cheat days to keep yourself motivated. But do not forget that the ultimate goal is to stop them completely.
You have to look for means to meddle the customs of unhealthy habits and institute new ones while maintaining your healthy habits. Start by making small daily changes like carrying a refillable water bottle with you so you can stay hydrated throughout the day or packing healthy snacks to take to work.
Make small, powerful changes.
It is very unreasonable to tell someone to stop doing something they have been doing for a long time. Instead, we must try smaller things like, avoiding sugar in coffee or replacing regular rice with brown rice or replacing cow’s milk with alternative milk like almond or coconut milk.
These type of changes are powerful yet small because they do not make a drastic or significant change in your general routine. You can also try replacing your regular cola breaks with authentic fruit juices or other wellness drinks.
‘Don’t try to make massive, and all-embracing life changes out of the blue. This can leave you feeling puzzled and induced to give up on the whole. Begin from scratch and build. For example, if you are looking towards starting a new exercise plan because you feel intimidated and out of shape, start by doing the easiest you can do. Like walking around the block or a few rounds around the local park.
Once it seems like a regular part of your life, you can then progressively upscale it. This way, even if you encounter a hindrance, you won’t get into a guilt trip. Go back to doing what you were doing. The ultimate intention is to formulate habits that feel easy to achieve to keep yourself motivated throughout.
A Balanced Diet And Exercise – Two Sides Of The Health Coin
“You are what you eat.”
Might sound cliche but it is actually true. What we eat directly impacts our health. A well-balanced diet is key to a healthy lifestyle. The only gymming doesn’t really help.
The common myth that surrounds the common gymming notion is that exercising in itself is enough for reducing weight, but the paradox is that only 20% of the body transformation depends on gymming and exercising and the rest 80% depends on what you consume and how you consume.
Therefore a healthy body is the result of proper working out or exercising and having food with the right amount of fats, carbohydrates and proteins. If you do not diet properly, the exercise that you do goes in vain and vice versa — poor coordination between the two results in various chronic and temporary conditions ranging from fatigue to heart conditions.
Another vital thing to consider here is that you don’t have to give up on all your favourite things in one blow. You can still have your cherry cake or your waking-up-late mornings once in a while to get yourself a break.
But make sure your break not for too long. Keep in mind, the ultimate goal of having a healthy lifestyle without any disruptions.
Get enough sleep.
Sleep and its associated phenomena are becoming increasingly spreading over the world wide web in the past few months. A lot of physical and mental ailments are being associated with the sleep habits of people.
The primary function of sleep is that it restores you. It brings back your body to an energetic condition because of two reasons – you get complete rest; most of the metabolism happens during sleep.
People often overlook the importance of getting enough sleep. The sedentary and fast moving work culture that we live in does not give us enough scope for properly getting a good night’s sleep to recover the whole day’s activity. Another thing that has impacted this sleep cycle is the long hours of staring into screens for more than required.
The best way to get the required amount of sleep is to manage work-life balance and bring out the best schedule for your online activities. A digital detox every now and then could also help you not only in maintaining good sleep but also in your health as a whole.
Our system compels us to survive in extraordinarily active and pressurized circumstances. These might be with respect to both physical and mental activities. They also occur so fast in our life, that most of the time, we struggle to keep up with them.
These tiny moments of pressure accumulate to stress and disrupt our mental peace. It is essential that we differentiate among the situations that are within our check and the things that aren’t. For instance, falling sick in the middle of the week, which disrupts your daily regime is not in your hands.
But spending more time with your mobile and losing sleep to get sleep cycle issues is in your hands. In the end, it matters how you manage these circumstances to the bare minimum and not let them affect your general schedule.
Many of us also centre our world in our work life and the day to day tasks that we forget to enjoy the focused we experience. It is essential to stop and experience the moments as they are, laugh at silly things now and then and make time for the little things to give us happiness.
