Many of us are looking to make changes to our health following a year of messed up schedules and life-altering events. Whether that involves getting back on track with a healthy diet, starting up a new food or exercise plan or re-introducing some much-needed gym time after the repeated closures, we are here to assist.
Often, getting back into, or introducing, healthy patterns can seem so overwhelming as a whole, which is why breaking the effort down into bitesize chunks can make the approach feel much more achievable. To help you overcome those challenges, we’ve put together 10 simple goals to set your health on the right track.
Start meditating daily
As you accustom yourself to simply sitting quietly with your eyes closed and taking measured breaths, you could soon find that you can focus, concentrate and sleep better, as a Medium article points out, so try it out for five to ten minutes a day. Meditating is a great starting point and will ultimately have a big effect on many areas of your life, don’t underestimate the impact that ten minutes a day of meditation can have on your wellbeing.
Eat just one more vegetable a day
It’s well-advised that you try to eat a range of vegetables in a mix of colours to help ensure you get various vitamins into your diet. If you’re not very good at getting those important vegetables into your meals then you could start diversifying your diet in this way by adding mushrooms to your toast for breakfast, try an extra carrot with your lunch, or sneak in some extra vegetables with dinner.
Drink a glass of water every morning
It is recommended to drink eight glasses of water a day, and that seems like quite a lot if you’re not keen on the stuff already. Consuming a glass of water when you first wake up will help you on your way towards suitably replenishing your fluids from the night, a step important to the health of your body and skin as well as your overall wellbeing. And once you start the day with good intentions, it will hopefully lead to better decisions throughout the day.
Write down what you daily eat
A great way to get an overall picture of your eating habits and to help you decide if there are any amendments that can be made is to keep a food diary. This is not to fill you with guilt, but to offer a valuable insight into how you are routinely nourishing yourself, consequently, you will be able to easily identify bad eating habits and ways to potentially regulate them.
Look for any food triggers
If you are overeating, could there be important underlying reasons why? If you notice that you tend to eat more often when, for example, you are bored or stressed, you could then work on changing that negative behaviour, as Healthline notes. Keeping that food diary along with other notes about your health and mood can help you to spot trends and provide you with something to work with.
Do some exercise every day, even just for five minutes
Getting yourself up and moving will set you on your way to a much healthier path in the long run. Starting small is a great way to achieve this, so opt for five minutes a day to start with. This exercise could consist of jumping, squatting, dancing, hula hooping, or any other exercise you could fit into an easy five-minute session. Add the exercise to your to-do list in advance, and you will be afforded the satisfaction of crossing off that activity after completing it.
Try to slowly increase your amount of daily exercise over time
Start with five-minute sessions and build up the time in five-minute chunks as and when you feel ready, you may be enjoying the positive feelings and energy this gives you so much that you increase your time sooner than you think!
Alternatively, if you get yourself used to running a mile three times a week, you could soon transition into running a couple of miles on one or two of those occasions and build up the distance over time. Or you could incorporate different exercises into your routine to mix it up a bit if you are likely to get bored or doing the same thing.
Invest in new clothes for your workouts
As workouts become cemented as a major part of your routine, you should definitely think about buying new attire to get you in the mode. A new tracksuit can look as good in the queue at your local supermarket as it does in the gym, click here for an array of men’s tracksuits and get ready to up your fitness game once you’re dressed for success.
Spend a week instilling consistency into your life
Whatever new, small habit you want to take up, commit yourself to following it for a week at first. A HuffPost piece says that doing this “will signal to your body and soul that consistency is possible, and steadiness will follow.” Whether that habit is meditation, drinking water, eating more vegetables or exercising, focus on one and do it well then the rest will follow.
Replace each negative thought with a positive one
While negative thoughts will inevitably drift into your mind from time to time, consciously replacing them as they arrive over a three-day period can soon leave you with far fewer spontaneous adverse thoughts than before. Psychologists suggest that we have an average of 6,000 thoughts every single day and if you lean towards the negative in life, this can feel a bit much at times, so working hard to replace each conscious negative thought with a positive one can leave you feeling much brighter and more positive in general and ready to tackle those goals.
