Your Health Journey and Finding the Right Motivation

Everyone journey to health is different, and this journey begins when you first realize that your lifestyle is not sustainable. You cannot keep eating what you are eating and expect to have the lifelong outlook you are hoping for, or perhaps you no longer have the metabolism from when you were younger. One day you will look at what you are doing to yourself, from the processed foods to even the vices you consume, and realize that if you want to live a happy and healthy life for as long as possible, something needs to change.

Change, of course, doesn’t come by quite so easily. Our habits have been formed and developed over the years – decades, even. These habits weren’t made because they were good for us, but rather because they felt good. Eating fatty foods feels good. Eating salty foods feels good. Lying down after a long day and putting your feet up feels good. Exercise, healthy eating, and healthy living all take a lot of effort, but once you start and get the ball rolling, you’ll realize how much better you can feel.

Healthy Eating

Our bodies need sustenance to survive, but they need nutrients to thrive. To be healthy means ensuring that not only are you not consuming substances that hurt your organs, but support their function instead. Nutrients, however, aren’t enough. Your body requires a lot of energy in order to function, which is why most can benefit from a 60-20-20 ratio diet, where 60% of their diet is made up of carbohydrates, 20% fats, and 20% proteins. In other words, you need an average of 1200 calories from carbohydrates, 400 calories from protein, and 400 calories from fats (from a 2000 calorie diet). The nutrients your body needs (vitamins and minerals) can be found in the options you eat or from vitamin supplements. 

What You Need to Do

To improve your health, you need to improve your diet. While yes your body needs fats to survive, where you get these fats is another story entirely. “Healthy fats” support your body and your health. Examples include avocados, nuts, olive oil, salmon, and more. Unhealthy fats are those that typically exist as a solid at room temperature, like butter.

For those who are looking to increase their nutrient content, look no further than fruits and vegetables, which are high in fiber and many of the essential vitamins your body needs to survive. Just remember that you don’t have to cut out everything else from your diet to be healthy; a balance is what is needed, and each person’s diet requirements will differ.

How to Stay Motivated

Healthy eating requires you to forgo processed foods because those high in trans fats and other chemicals can actually prevent your body from absorbing nutrients. These very processed foods, however, can be very addictive. That is why starting a healthy diet can be so difficult for many, because there are unexpected withdrawal symptoms. Clear out the bad food from your home and bring your friends over and create a weekly meal collection of healthy foods. Cooking with your friends can make the process much more enjoyable, and preparing food in advance can mean you have healthy options to eat whenever you are hungry.

Exercise and Fitness

While healthy eating can be done in advance, allowing you to be “lazy” and beneficial to your diet, exercise isn’t quite so easy. Although the actual process of exercising produces many feel-good hormones, the problem is becoming more active in the first place.

What You Need to Do

Exercise is beneficial, regardless of whether you go to the gym or simply go on walks in the morning. The point is to stay active. If you have fitness goals, however, and want to tone up and get the shape you want, you will have to opt for more precise and targeted exercises. Strength training and stamina training combined will help you slim down, shape up, and boost your mood and energy levels.

How to Stay Motivated

Exercise is exhausting, which is why it’s very hard to keep up without the proper motivation. Rather than going at it alone, sign up for Transform Personal Training. Having a personal trainer will allow you to not only do the right exercises to get the results you want but also to ensure you do them correctly. It is very easy to hurt yourself when exercising by using incorrect movements. Working with a personal trainer can help you get the results you want and help you have fun while you are doing it.

Practicing Wellness

Healthy eating and exercise can do a lot for your body. Not only can it help you feel better, but it can help you look better too. Wellness, however, goes further than that. Wellness means combining physical health with mental health, and ensuring that you are living a fruitful and fulfilling life. When you do not practice wellness you can become stressed; you can find you are neglecting aspects of your life that are important to you, and you also might find your mental health suffering. That is why when combined with a good diet and regular exercise; you need to use these tips to help safeguard your mental health:

What You Need to Do

Wellness means putting your mental health first. To do this, you must first recognize the areas in your life that are causing you stress:

Your Social Life

Keeping friends or family members that do nothing but put you down and make you feel worse about yourself is not practicing wellness. Be clear and honest with these people on how their behavior makes you feel, and if they do not rectify their abuse, then it’s time to cut them out of your life. Make room and time for the good people in your life, and you’ll have your outlook improved immensely.

Your Work

Work can be stressful, and in small doses, it can be beneficial to your work ethic. Long-term or chronic stress, however, can hurt both your physical and your mental health. Chronic stress causes muscles to knot, leading to discomfort and in the worst cases even stomach ulcers. Stress is also known to lower your immune system, cause anxiety and depression, and can lead to insomnia. Practicing wellness means saying no to work you cannot handle, to disconnecting from work after you leave the office, and practicing relaxation techniques to help you through the hardest and most stressful times.

Your Hobbies

Your hobbies can provide a lot of comfort in your life and can help you feel more fulfilled. Neglecting your hobbies means ignoring the things that you love to do, which can cause you to distress in their own way. Take up your hobbies and make more time for them, and you will enjoy your downtime more than you ever could by browsing your phone.

Your Personal Goals

Your personal goals can be anything, but not actively working towards them can cause you distress. No one wants to feel like they are wasting their life, after all. To be more proactive about your goals you need to turn them from end-destinations to steps. The smaller and more manageable the step, the better. From there all you need to do is take these small steps towards fulfilling your dream.

More Wellness Techniques to Keep You Happy

Wellness doesn’t just mean finding the sources of your stress and combating them on a local level, either. Wellness means improving. It means doing things that make you feel proud of yourself. So go out and take that class, or go to a talk, or read another book. The more you improve, the more confident in yourself and your abilities you will be.

Learning doesn’t necessarily have to mean education, either. Go to new places, explore, and try out new experiences at every turn. Wellness and living a fulfilling life go hand-in-hand, and doing more with your spare time to better your life can make every day an adventure.

How to Stay Motivated

Unlike healthy eating and exercising, practicing wellness means immediate benefits. The only complication is learning that it is okay to say no and that it is okay to take a step back. You don’t have to press hard every single day. Instead, take your time. If you can be content with every single day, you can live a happier, better life overall.

Healthy living is not just a buzzword. It isn’t something that fitness coaches use to make you feel bad on Instagram, either. No, healthy living means taking control of your life. It means being healthier, being more active, and it means improving your longevity and quality of life from now and throughout your years. Healthy living means focusing on your wellness and on ensuring you are leading a life you love. Don’t waste away on the couch, get up and get active. The thing with healthy living is that all these factors benefit each other, meaning you can improve and keep improving in all areas of your life.