9 Strategies For Maintaining A Healthy Lifestyle
Maintaining a healthy lifestyle requires self-awareness, planning and discipline. But don't let that fool you into believing you must be a harsh taskmaster, running a strict dictatorship over your body - no! Think of a loving parent, who kindly corrects and disciplines their child because they ultimately want what is best for them. The motivator for discipline must be love.
Inner dialogue and relationship with oneself is a passion of mine which I often centre my coaching around, so it's easy for me to digress and wax lyrical on that topic. But I'm going to try and keep the rest of this post practical, providing you with some strategical tips to keep you on track with meeting your personal health goals.
Why Maintaining A Healthy Lifestyle Is The Key To Achieving Long-Term Goals!
In a commercial world designed to distract you and sell, sell, sell every product, staying focused on healthy living can be a challenge. So how is it possible to keep on achieving your personal health and sporting goals? (Spoiler alert; it's going to take more than motivation). You need strategy.
A strategy is defined as "a plan chosen to bring about a desired result, such as achieving a goal or solution to a problem". So if you find yourself easily distracted by the next, newest sparkly 'thing' or simply get side-lined by life's pressures, a strategy may be the answer you're looking for to keep you on track.
A short-term plan usually looks like following the latest fad diet with strategies such as cutting out certain food groups to drop weight fast. But, what happens when those generic strategies, created by someone else, do not fit into your lifestyle? Pretty soon you start to feel restricted and weighed down with following something you simply don't enjoy. Adherence drops and after mere weeks or even days, you wind up back at square one.
A better approach for achieving your long-term goals is by developing and maintaining a healthy lifestyle including personalised strategies that are tailored to you (partnered with the flexibility and awareness that your plan may need to be adapted over time). Having a coach (nutrition and/or training) can be really helpful here but it's not essential! Give yourself time to step off the rollercoaster of life, collect your thoughts, identify what it really is you want to achieve and how you want to feel, put pen to paper and develop your game plan.
It's crucial to keep things simple and reasonable so they last. If they're enjoyable, even better! If your'e stuck for ideas, below are 9 strategies for maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Take inspiration and in time, you will develop your own simple strategies to keep you focused on your health and sporting goals - long-term.
9 Strategies For Maintaining A Healthy Lifestyle
Keep a spare pair of trainers in your office, car, or by the door so you can go for a quick walk at lunch, when a spare 5 minutes arises, when you begin to feel overwhelmed or simply when the mood strikes you.
Partner up: Instead of sitting in. a cafe, suggest a walking meeting with a coworker or walking date with a friend (you could always grab a coffee-to-go on the way). Likewise, you could plan weekly social walks with a neighbour, there is nothing like the accountability of helping someone else out to give you a nudge on the days you don't want to do something!
Walk instead of driving whenever it is reasonable. Park at the far-end of the car park. Take the stairs. it all adds up.
Diarise it. Schedule purposeful exercise in your calendar and treat it as a non-negotiable appointment like going to the doctor's.
Curate your environment: Whatever you have on hand in your office or at home is what's you'll grab. So keep a vibrant fruit bowl in your line of sight. Keep your fridge and freezer stocked with fresh, whole foods and your cupboards filled with fruit or herbal teas.
Most people trip up when it comes to snacking, so prep snack portions to grab both at home and on the road. Use mini saucers, Tupperware or snack bags.
Cook once, eat twice (or more): If the oven is on, you may as well cook double the quantity and portion up containers to enjoy the next day or even freeze for a later date so that you always have healthy, home-cooked ready-meals for fuel.
Keep a running grocery list on your kitchen counter so you stay on top of what's run out. This will really help avoid that end-of-week, pre-shop food slump where you're scraping the house for food but struggling to put well balanced meals together.
Fill a large water bottle at the start of your day and refill it at lunch. My clients often find a bottle with a straw really helps keep overall intake up throughout the day.
Of course, these are just suggestions and you may identify other areas of life where you'd like to make improvements. Come up with your own personal strategies for maintaining a healthy lifestyle for long-term success.
Remember, you don't have to do it all at once. begin slow, only adding in a new habit when you feel you have cemented in the former, and ALWAYS, be kind to yourself along the way.
Thanks for reading,
Tamar
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