Health is one of the most important aspects of life that needs to be properly maintained. A healthy and fit body is extremely needed in order to be productive at work, fully present in your home with your family, and to enjoy leisure activities by yourself or with other people. If you don’t know how to start a healthy lifestyle, here’s some simple tips on how to do it.
Maintain A Healthy Weight
The first thing you should do to start a healthy lifestyle is to properly maintain your body weight. This is extremely important since by keeping your weight in the healthy range, you would be able to prevent multiple health issues such as heart disease, high cholesterol, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and high blood pressure.
But what to be considered as a healthy weight is not the same for everyone. Usually, a doctor would use your BMI or Body Mass Index and your waist circumference in order to determine what is the healthy weight for you. Not only that, other aspects that seem to be irrelevant are also affecting this such as body composition, age and even ethnicity.
Limit the Intakes of Processed Foods and Sugar
The next thing you should do is probably quite difficult, which is trying to limit processed foods and sugar. This one is particularly hard since you can find these almost anywhere, especially when you go to the grocery store. But this step is crucial since most highly processed foods have more fat, salt, added sugars and calories with fewer nutrients that are important for your body.
Meanwhile, in order to limit your sugar intake, you need to avoid candy, packaged chips and cookies, sweetened cereal, and most importantly soda which is notorious for having a ridiculous and abnormal level of sugar. Of course you’re not expected to give up these immediately, you can start slow by limiting one product at time and then gradually add more and more products.
Drink Water
This one is a no-brainer and the easiest way to start and maintain a healthy lifestyle, but a lot of people still are not doing it. Keeping your body hydrated with water is not only to quench your thirst but also to make sure that your brain and body keep running properly. Make sure you always have your mineral water bottle ready when you go to work, to the park, gym and basically anywhere.
By not drinking enough water, you would start to feel the effects such as getting harder to think which would affect your work in a significant way. Not only that, not drinking enough water could also lead to other health related issues such as increased joint pain, decreased energy level, digestion issues, and decreasing your heart’s health.
Reduce Your Sitting and Screen Time
The next thing you should do is probably quite hard to do if your work demands you to sit in front of a computer for a great portion of the day. But reducing your sitting and screen time is really important in order to make sure your heart stays healthy. Prolonged sedentary behaviors, especially sitting, is linked to various health issues such as weight gain and heart disease.
You might think that you can balance it by exercising but that isn’t actually effective in your effort to counter the effects. So what could you do if you have to sit for a long time at work? You could try having breaks regularly from sitting by just standing up near your desk or taking a short walk around the office. Make sure you also cut your screen time to protect your eyes.
If You Smoke, Quit
Smoking is a regular habit for some people and is one of the ways they use to help with the load of work they are doing every day. If you are a smoker and want to be healthy, then there’s no way around it, you need to immediately quit. Smoking is the first risk factor of lung cancer, that alone should be enough to make you stop smoking. Not only that, smoking regularly will also damage your heart, your reproductive system and many more. So if you want to start a healthy lifestyle and maintain it, quitting smoking is a must. Since cigarettes are highly addictive, quitting it would be really hard and you’re not expected to do it immediately. Try to reduce your cigarettes per day slowly and steadily.
