Healthy Habits That Will Drastically Improve Your Life
A healthy lifestyle is one that everybody should strive towards.
Poor health, low energy levels, and a lack of nutrition can negatively impact every part of your life.
Your daily routine can become compromised, your performance, your mental health, and your overall physical health.
With social media on the rise, it’s imperative to incorporate good habits that will help you sustain a healthy lifestyle. It’s not about the number on the scale, it’s not about looking a certain way and fitting into X size jeans.
It’s about feeling your best. It’s about going to bed without feeling like a bloated balloon; it’s about feeling like you nourished your body as opposed to eating whatever was easy and most accessible.
It’s about having the ability to perform well because you fuel yourself with the best. You can’t give your all to your business, your family, or anything else that you do if you aren’t taking care of yourself daily.
Here’s a list of habits to incorporate into your daily life that will drastically improve your overall well-being.
Healthy Eating
You knew this was coming.
Throughout history, the wealthiest people would often display their wealth through grand banquets and feasts. Food would signify a good life and living well.
However, nowadays, people see food as much more than just a nutritional need. Often, people use food in a destructive way — overeating and eating unhealthy foods — which negatively impacts our bodies instead.
Something that isn’t talked about nowadays is the power of eating traditional food.
There is scientific evidence as to why traditional foods enjoyed by our ancestors thousands of years ago can keep us lean and disease-free today.
By doing so, we can then reconnect with ourselves and our roots.
In Deep Nutrition, by Catherine Shanahan, she claims that our modern Western diet has made us weak and sick and that this sickness is evident down to the level of how our DNA is expressed.
The solution?
A return to traditional foods that our ancestors ate for millennia. Foods that evolved with us and provided our genomes with the proper nutrition for us to thrive as a species.
I’ll give an example, my mother is Ukrainian, and my father is a mix of Arab and Italian. His family migrated from Italy to Jordan. While my mother grew up eating Russian and Ukrainian food, my father preferred Lebanese, Palestinian, and Italian. He taught her how to cook, and as I was growing up, my diet consisted of a mixed Mediterranean diet.
As I’ve studied and learned more about the body and how it works, I’ve recognized that my body thrives off of a Mediterranean diet. I always feel good after a meal of falafel, hummus, shawarma, and pasta. I can easily digest these things without getting bloated or feeling sluggish.
However, I know for a fact that it’s difficult for my body to process any type of Thai or Vietnamese food. I find that the oils, sauces, and other ingredients that are used don’t make my body feel good.
It’s all about trial and error, understanding what works with your body and what doesn’t.
I won’t dive in too deep if you’re interested in learning more, the book is a phenomenal read, but I will leave you with this:
Healthy eating is not about following one particular diet over another. It’s not about eating 110% clean. It’s about incorporating the foods our bodies have evolved to eat so we can maximize our health and vitality.
It’s about feeding your body with proper nutrients, proteins, carbohydrates, all the while still incorporating balance in your life.
Start small. Take the leap towards understanding your body, learn what makes it feel good, and what doesn’t. Create weekly meal plans that will help you stay on track, create weekly budgets that will allow you to buy wholesome food that isn’t processed.
What you put inside of your body will eventually show on the outside, so be conscious of your choices.
Daily Physical Activity
If you want to live a long and healthy life, you can’t be a couch potato.
Exercising daily is necessary. Whether that’s walking, jogging, running, swimming, doing yoga, whatever your choice of activity level might be — it needs to be a regular thing.
As you age, you tend to lose muscle mass and function, which can lead to injuries and disabilities. Incorporating regular physical activity is essential to reducing muscle loss and maintaining strength.
It doesn’t need to be drastic; you don’t need to be in the gym for 2+ hours every single day.
Incorporating fitness into your life can be as simple as taking 30 minute walks every day, getting 10k steps in, just move your body.
Hydration
Your hydration strongly influences your brain. Studies show that even mild dehydration can impair many aspects of brain function.
Dehydration can even cause headaches, migraines; it can affect your performance in the gym, work-life, etc.
More importantly, you can’t have regular bowel movements if you’re not adequately hydrated.
Constipation is a common problem amongst people, and before jumping to the conclusion that your digestion isn’t right — you need to ask yourself:
Am I dehydrated? Did I drink enough water today? What about yesterday?
I struggle with drinking water; some days, it just doesn’t taste good to me, which is why I go through the benefits of it in my head and still force myself to drink it.
Clear your skin and make it appear more bright and vibrant
Digestive system depends on it
Boosts exercise performance
Helps with weight loss
Flushes your system
Something that always helps me along with that is having a flask of cold water filled up next to me; I can sip on it all day because its readily available.
If you struggle with your water intake, consider drinking other things such as tea or mineral water. I consume at least one kombucha a day, which helps as well both with hydration and digestion.
Meditation
Just as we like to go through detoxes for our bodies, it is equally as important to detox your mind. However, instead of paying for overpriced celery juice and expensive trainers, you can learn to do things like meditating so that you could feel your best.
Mental and emotional toxins can often go unnoticed. Still, they are just as essential to clean up, given the constant overload we live in and the overwhelming busyness of our daily lives.
If you want to live a life with more control over your thoughts and yourself, more self-love, less self-criticism, less clutter, than this is just the thing for you.
Meditation can enable you to develop a sense of awareness that will always bring you back to center in times of chaos.
Start easy.
Practice by sitting and observing your breathing. You can even utilize a guided video to help.
Consider your breathing, think about how the air is coming out of your mouth, how your lungs rise, focus on inhaling and exhaling.
Sit still; it’s okay to think about what you’re having for lunch that day when you first start your body won’t understand what you’re trying to do, but with practice, it’ll soon embrace it and allow you to become centered.
Incorporate meditating in your morning routine, in your lunch break, or whenever you feel suits your needs. The benefits will be astounding.
Bottom Line
Overall, learn healthy eating habits that will allow you to fuel your body but also let you enjoy life.
Stop jumping through diets; they’re not sustainable. Learn to reconnect with your roots, eat the food of your people. Unless the food of your people is highly processed junk food — omit that.
Incorporate physical activity throughout your day, go on a morning run, take a walk during lunch, see the sunset.
Hydrate — always. Think of it as flushing your body of toxins.
Meditation is healthy for your mind, body, and soul. Don’t neglect taking care of your mental health.
