There are all kinds of methodologies out there for getting and staying healthy. Of course, these can depend entirely on what your goals are in life. If you wish to lose weight, there are a million diets and approaches, many conveniently designed to sell you a course. If you want to build muscle there are many excellent plans for doing so, but also the implication that a personal trainer is likely the best course of option (that’s not always true).
Because “the conversation” around health needs to perpetuate itself and is part of our market, it can seem as though staying constantly “on the journey” and always having a new approach to follow is really the goal of all this talk, and nothing else.
If you’re not careful, you might find that you’ve twenty subscriptions on the go, ten diets, four workout plans, eighteen supplements, and five different routines gunning for your attention, the only constant in all this being your sense of frustration and lack of progress. Sometimes, you just need to simplify everything to make it calmer and more comfortable. Thinking clearly is a huge element of recovering into a healthy lifestyle.
So, how do you go about simplifying it all? Let’s consider that, below:
Focus On The Three Pillars
Sleep, diet, exercise. In that order. If you can fix those well, then you’ll be surprised just how much healthier you feel. Sleeping just means getting as close to eight hours a night as you can, uninterrupted, without caffeine still in your system, or constantly waking up with poor sleep hygiene. Diet means eating at maintenance or a little below it with as many vegetables as you can fit into that, and eating nutrient-rich foods. Exercise can be as simple as walking or getting up from your desk and stretching multiple times a day. This is so simple, but if you can sustain those bedrocks, you may be amazed at your progress.
Identify One Major Area Of Change
We tend to think that fixing health is holistic and so we should try to fix every single bad habit we have at once. But does that really work? Not always. In fact, taking on too much can lead to burnout or that sense of too much complexity to manage. What if you focused on quitting smoking for good, and then used that as a step to move forward into running, instead of trying to do both at once? It doesn’t matter if you use cold turkey, patches and a healthcare program, or smoking cessation hypnosis, because you’ll be able to focus your entire energy into it for good.
Journal Your Activities
One of the reasons a complex health schedule can be so dizzying is that you have to recall everything together at once. You have other things to think about on top of that, and so going by the seat of your pants is a little much to ask. That’s why it’s good to journal your activities to the extent you can. A note-taking app, dietary calorie counter app scanner, exercise journal or even just an old notebook is fine. You can then get your thoughts out, and focus (with renewed energy) on the reality of change.
With this advice, you’ll be sure to avoid making a healthy lifestyle too complex to follow.