Last updated on June 11th, 2021 at 04:08 pm
Starting a healthy lifestyle is fun.
Changes in our lifestyle gradually are easier to maintain than major changes introduced suddenly.
Try to keep a note of what you consume for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Keer track for what snacking habits do you have.
Along with your food lists, make a list of your daily movements.
It won’t be difficult to spot where we could improve for starting a healthy lifestyle.
1. Start Now and Keep Changing Gradually:
– Skipping breakfast?
A small bowl of oats, fruits, or any multi-grain bread, could help you slowly to change your morning routine.
It would always prefer to drink warm water, coconut water, or any vegetable juice in the morning.
Then have any seasonal fruit for starting a healthy lifestyle.
– Favorite foods high in fat?
Eliminate those from your diet and oath yourself not to go back to your old habits.
Find the option for low-fat healthy foods and know how to eat small portions during meals and stay fit.
– Too little activity?
Start from your home.
Use more stairs and try to take a 5 to 10 minutes gap from sitting position.
Walk during that 5-10 minutes.
2. Start The Day With a Glass of Warm Water:
This should be a default morning routine for starting a healthy lifestyle.
Water gives you a healthy start because it helps in the proper circulation of nutrients in the body. Water serves as the body’s transportation system.
a) Help in Weight Loss:
Water doesn’t have some magical property that kills fat.
But it can help you with your weight loss efforts.
First off, by staying hydrated, one can prevent overeating.
That is because a lot of people confuse thirst with hunger!
Is not drinking water better than eating high energy foods?
b) Flushes Out Toxins Early On:
It is a long-known secret that drinking water as soon as you get up, i.e. before eating anything is a good way to purify your internal system.
This practice helps to flush off the toxins from our body and cleanses the colon thus it enables better absorption of nutrients from various foods.
Note: If you are bored with drinking plain water, you can add a dash of lemon. The benefits of lemon warm water in the morning is it helps in detoxification and tastes good.
3. Consume a Healthy Breakfast:
Starting a healthy lifestyle has a lot to do with your meal timings.
Since breakfast is the most important meal of the day, here are a few perfect tips for a healthy breakfast:
The optimum time to have breakfast is 7 am, or within the first hour of waking up.
Breakfast should always be healthier, heavier, and eaten at earliest.
Almost 60% of our total calories should come from our breakfast.
Fruits and vegetables are among the most important foods for giving us enough vitamins, minerals, and fiber.
We should try to eat at least 5 servings a day.
For example, a glass of fresh fruit juice at breakfast, perhaps an apple and a piece of watermelon as snacks, and a good portion of different vegetables at each meal.
You can then add protein-rich items like eggs or sprouts.
Studies show that including eggs in breakfast can help you eat fewer calories for the next 3 hours.
Which translates to losing more weight and body fat.
If you don’t prefer eggs for some reason, then any source of good quality protein should do the trick.
Suggestion: After a protein-rich food, you can consume regular breakfast items consisting of complex carbs or healthy carbs such as pesarattu (moong dal chilla)/ idly/ wheat vegetable upma/ vegetable dosa/ red poha with vegetables, etc.
4. Make Some Morning Exercise Routine:
We know morning could be a hectic time but try taking time out for at least 15 minutes of morning exercise for weight loss.
It could something simple like spot jogging, planks, squats, or even a few Surya Namaskar.
Starting a healthy lifestyle, 150 minutes per week of moderate physical activity is advised, and it can easily become part of our daily routine.
We all could:
– use the stairs instead of the elevator,
– go for a walk during lunch breaks (and stretch in our offices in between)
– make time for a family weekend activity
5. Reduce Salt and Sugar Intake:
A high salt intake can result in high blood pressure, and increase the risk of cardiovascular disease.
There are different ways to reduce salt in the diet:
- When shopping, we could choose products with lower sodium content.
- When cooking, salt can be substituted with spices, increasing the variety of flavors and tastes.
- When eating, it helps not to have salt at the table, or at least not to add salt before tasting.
Sugar provides sweetness and an attractive taste, but sugary foods and drinks are rich in energy and are best enjoyed in moderation, as an occasional treat.
We could use fruits instead, even to sweeten our foods and drinks.
6. Balanced Healthy Diet:
Starting a healthy lifestyle or a healthy living is very much about having all the food groups in your diet.
With zero carb diet plans becoming popular for weight loss, one should know that every food group is important for the body.
Carbohydrates are all about energy and are found in foods like fruits, grains, bread, and dairy products.
They have wrongly implicated because they provide energy but they also provide both minerals and vitamins.
The problem is that a low-carbohydrate diet is not a normal balance of physiologic nutrition.
As soon as you start eating carbohydrates again, your body replenishes your carbohydrate stores and your weight comes back.
So it is always advisable to have everything as per the required allowance.
As mentioned earlier, at least 5 servings of fruits and vegetables in a day because that is the recommended amount to keep lifestyle diseases at bay.
Hence, we should not avoid this food group as a part of a healthy daily diet.
We also tell you why you shouldn’t count calories for weight loss or otherwise.
7. Consume Healthy Snacks:
You may have a healthy diet plan but as long as you don’t account for snacks, you may fail at leading a healthy lifestyle.
How to counter this?
Always have healthy, non-fried but baked snacks handy.
If possible, you can make some yourself at home!
That will prevent unnecessary snacking.
In fact, frequently snacking with small healthy meals help in weight maintenance.
8. Get Enough Sleep:
Sleep has the ability to optimize mental and physical energy, and optimal levels of sleep (about eight hours a night) are linked with reduced risk of chronic disease and improved longevity for starting a healthy lifestyle it’s a mandatory step.
One simple strategy that can help ensure you get optimal amounts of sleep is to go to bed earlier.
Getting into bed by 10 pm or, 10.30 pm is a potentially useful investment in terms of your short and long-term health and well-being.
Shutting down the computer or turning off the TV early in the evening is often all it takes to create the time and space for earlier sleep.
9. Maintain a Healthy Body Weight:
The right weight for each of us depends on factors like our gender, height, age, and genes.
Being overweight increases the risks of a wide range of diseases, including diabetes, heart diseases, and cancer.
Excess body fat comes from eating more than we need.
The extra calories can come from any caloric nutrient – protein, fat, carbohydrate, or alcohol.
But fat is the most concentrated source of energy.
Physical activity helps us spend energy, and makes us feel good.
The message is reasonably simple:
if we are gaining weight, we need to eat less and be more active!
10. Practice The Art of Appreciation:
Modern-day living tends to be aspirational and we can easily find ourselves chasing an ever-growing list of goals, many of which can be material.
Some of us could do with spending more time focusing not on what we don’t have, but on what we do.
Our mood can be lifted by giving thanks for anything from our friends and family to a beautiful landscape or sunset.
Conclusion:
In this article, I have shared 10 insanely actionable tips for starting a healthy lifestyle right away.
And I am sure the tips are simple enough to follow by most of us.
In fact, I personally try to follow them in my day-to-day life.
So if you can take action for starting a healthy lifestyle, you can surely start reaping the benefits within days.
Finally, let me know what do you think about this article on starting a healthy lifestyle by leaving a quick comment below in the comment box.
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