Making Healthiness Habitual Rather Than A Dull Ritual

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Healthy living is a concept which feels rather forced in our faces by the media. For many people, the reasons to eat, sleep and breathe healthily involve appearance. The perfect figure is often the poster boy or girl of a healthy diet. That’s what motivates people, and it’s likely what’s motivated you in the past. However, when the healthy routine becomes dull, you start to slip back into your old ways. That’s because the end goal of “looking good” isn’t often enough to overhaul your daily lifestyle.

You’re a busy person, and you don’t have time to workout ten hours a day or the energy to survive on nothing more than salad for lunch. Well, you shouldn’t have to. Patience is the key to healthy living, and you need to make your diet and exercise routine habitual rather than a ritual. That means it needs to weave into your existing daily pattern rather than becoming a time-consuming chore which you have to squeeze into your day. Here’s some advice on doing healthy living the right way.

Diet.

People interpret dieting in different ways. Whilst everybody has a diet, some people see “dieting” as a short term change of eating habits to knock off the pounds quickly. Starving yourself of important food until you reach a happier weight isn’t going to make you healthier, and it certainly won’t help you in the long run. If you can’t keep your diet up on a consistent basis then it’s not a diet; you’ll only end up returning to the old diet and putting those lost pounds back on. Fluctuating between weights is also an incredible strain on your body. If you’ve grown frustrated with regards to how slowly you seem to be losing weight then you could always consider popular options such as a juice cleanse to knock off the pounds in a matter of days; you’d just be removing toxins from your body rather than changing your diet altogether.

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The key to healthy eating in the long run, however, is moderation and consistency. Remember those two words, and don’t be too harsh on yourself if the results are slow either in terms of weight loss or achieving a shapelier and perhaps more muscular figure. Your health should be your priority, and you’ll be doing a lot to help keep your body fitter and stronger on the inside before you notice the effects on the outside. You should always ensure, above all else, that you’re entering a diet for the right reasons. It needs to be seen as a permanent fixture, as fad diets will do nothing to help you in the long term; you’ll just end up bouncing back to your old diet afterwards.

Exercise.

First of all, a workout shouldn’t feel like a regime. When it comes to living more healthily, exercise is probably your most dreaded element of this “new and improved” you. It doesn’t have to be, however, because you don’t have to overdo it. Whether it’s cardio to keep your heart healthy or strength training to keep your muscles strong (which is important even if you’re not a bodybuilder), exercise should simply be a healthy addition to your lifestyle.

If you want to lose weight then you need to burn more calories than you consume, but you don’t need to workout for hours at the gym each day to achieve this. Try to squeeze additional exercise into your everyday routine. Washing the dishes, walking into town to buy groceries and simply stretching during work breaks are all things which will help you burn off a few hundred extra calories per day. Don’t eat less than you should; just exercise enough to burn off whatever you’re consuming. Count up the calories in the food you eat during an average day and create an exercise routine around that.

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Healthiness Habitual pizza box

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Don’t try to be perfect.

If you deny yourself treats then you’ll only crave them all the more. Make Saturday or Sunday your takeaway night. Give yourself a little break each week and then return to healthy living afterwards. If you don’t reward yourself or at least allow yourself the odd treat then you’re evidently going to see your healthy routine as a chore. Give yourself a goal at the end of the week. Look forward to that pizza after all your hard work.

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