How To Maintain A Healthy Lifestyle
Now you know how to get started on your own fitness journey, how do you maintain a healthy lifestyle long-term?
Build a Solid Foundation
Set yourself up for success by building a solid foundation you can work from. Pick one area you’d like to work from, such as drinking more water everyday, and work on successfully building that habit until it becomes your new normal.
Help Yourself, To Help Yourself
Work with yourself, and not against yourself. If you make sure your environment is set up to help you, you’re more likely to succeed with your goals. Like the example of drinking more water everyday, get yourself a bottle with times written on it. Work towards meeting the targets and feel proud when you meet them. A lot of water bottles have the target times on them now and can cost just a few pounds. Invest in a bottle that’s at least 700ml to a litre, then you’ll only need to refill a couple of times during the day. This can be hugely motivating and having it on your desk at work or taking it with you on a walk will keep the new habit front and centre of your mind.
Adopt Healthy Everyday Habits To Support Your Goals
The small, everyday habits have a greater impact on us, probably more than most of us realise. It’s easy to focus on huge, life-overhauling changes as a way of measuring traction towards our goals, but it’s the smaller, everyday habits that carry us the furthest.
Surround Yourself With Like-Minded, Supportive People
It might be a phrase thrown about a lot for self-development, but it’s an important one. If you’re out with friends for dinner, and you want to eat a swap your chips for a side serving of steamed vegetables instead, the last thing you’ll want is anyone questioning your personal food choice. People can mean well, and not everyone may agree or support your drive to change your lifestyle, but when people close to you start picking at your choices it can feel really deflating. It can be so intimidating that you end up choosing something else on the menu that you don’t actually want, just to please someone else.
Surround yourself with people that support you even if they don’t necessarily understand your motivation for change. True friendships and relationships should have your welfare and best interests at heart.
Why Failure Is Key For Success
Many of us go all in when starting to lead a healthier lifestyle. But then life gets in the way – something changes and disrupts our new routine. Then all of our hard work feels undone so we throw in the towel, give up, and promise ourselves we’ll start again on Monday.
Let’s flip the mindset. Start viewing failure as an opportunity. We’re not actually failing if we view the challenges as an opportunity to learn from and find alternative solutions. If something isn’t working for you to succeed in your health and fitness goals, you have the power to change it.
