I’m sure if you are reading this report you would like to be a fitter, healthier version of yourself. The tricky part for most of us with the frenetic lifestyles we lead today, is how we can adopt healthier daily habits and stay consistent.

We make promises to ourselves like joining a gym, going more regularly to the gym, cooking healthier meals, cutting down on alcohol, getting better sleep, the list goes on.

Life seems to get in the way, you planned to cook a healthy meal when you arrived home from work, but something came up to scupper your plans. Now you only have time to grab a snack. The likelihood of you having something healthy already prepared is slim so you turn to the snacks cupboard, or pop to the local drive through.

How many times have you said to yourself at the beginning of the day “I’m going to do that gym class tonight”. You’re full of good intentions, it’s early in the day, you have energy. The day unfolds, work, family, life! Now the energy is low, you’re hungry, tired, your family needs you, you’re stressed. You can’t summon up the motivation to go to the gym or you no longer have time, “ah well perhaps tomorrow I’ll go”.

Does this seem at all familiar to you? How can you change things?

Trying to change everything in one go is not going to work, certainly not in the long run. What you need to do is make small changes, perhaps just one at a time, that you can be consistent with.

Reflect on your own lifestyle and identify behaviours or bad habits that sabotage your attempts to pursue better health.

When people struggle with eating healthily, several important aspects of good health suffer. Regulatory hormone levels become out of whack, the body’s ability to gain all the vital micronutrients (vitamins and minerals) it needs is compromised and sleep can be affected negatively. This means the body cannot achieve optimum daily organ function, brain power and energy levels for normal function let alone exercise. Sleep can affect and be affected by poor eating habits. It can be a vicious cycle.

So, where to start?

When it comes to making changes to your lifestyle that you can ingrain into permanent good daily habits, it’s important to take small steps. Everyone is unique, consequently the process will be different for everyone.

Sleep

If you are someone that gets 8 hours’ worth of quality sleep every night you probably won’t need to read the next section, you lucky person, for the rest of us this is relevant.

There are many factors that can affect sleep. Let’s assume you have a good bed and focus on other reasons you may not get the sleep you need.

Let’s list some negative factors for good sleep,

Not enough time,

Alcohol,

Dehydration,

Too much stimulant (coffee, tea, other caffeine drinks)

Too much light,

Too hot,

TV,

Phone,

General noise,

How many of these factors can you address?

Alcohol-

Contrary to what some people believe, alcohol does not aid sleep. It might induce sleep but the body’s ability to gain the full benefits of the sleep will be compromised by the fact that some organs will be in overdrive having to process the alcohol in the system.

Dehydration-

Dehydration can be a result of alcohol or caffeine consumption but going to bed dehydrated for any reason will influence the body’s ability to process toxins in the blood while sleeping. Dehydration can lead to deficiencies in melatonin which can cause insomnia.

Too Much Stimulant-

Self-explanatory, stimulants influence the central nervous system and will keep you awake or prevent deep sleep.

Too Much Light-

Light has a big impact on our biological clock, too much light at night can delay or advance our “clock” and affect our sleep. You have probably witnessed how you wake so much easier in the summer months when the sun rises as early as 4.00am.

Too Hot-

For optimum sleep, deep REM sleep, the body needs to lower its temperature.

TV-

Watching TV can assist in falling asleep, many of us use it as a tool but it is not a good habit, relying on TV to get to sleep. The subconscious brain will tune in to the sound and light and disturb sleep. If you regularly fall asleep to TV how many times have you woken up from a dream where a program that is on the TV has become part of your dream?

Phone-

Do you find yourself needing to check your phone one last time before you put your head down? Do you keep getting disturbed by notification bells from your various social media accounts? If you use your phone as an alarm, get an alarm clock instead and leave the phone out of the room. There may even be an effect from the Wi-Fi signals but that’s a whole different report.

General Noise-

Some of us are more sensitive to noise than others but noise can have a big effect on quality of sleep.

Some Remedies-

Go to bed earlier, use black out blinds, eye mask, ear plugs, don’t drink caffeinated drinks or alcohol within about 4 hours of bedtime but drink some water, If you have to have TV, set the timer to switch it off, leave your phone out of the bedroom, regulate the temperature for optimum sleep at about 60F degrees and no higher than 68F degrees.

Be as consistent as you can and notice the difference. When you start to feel the benefits and your night time habits are set, it will be time to move on to the next Issue you may need to address.

The next potential issue to deal with is the possible lack of essential vitamins and minerals in the diet if you are someone that struggles with eating healthily on a consistent basis.

Keeping a personal food diary for a week or two would help you to identify vitamins and minerals you may be lacking in your diet.

If overhauling your diet is too much of a challenge at this time, you could consider using supplements containing vitamins and minerals that you have identified that may be missing from your diet.  

This should not be considered a permanent solution but a stop gap solution, until you are ready to move onto the next level of a healthier living strategy.

The benefits of getting your micronutrients from the food that you eat compared to supplementation are many fold. If you eat a varied healthy diet high in complex carbohydrate, fibre, quality fats and protein, all your daily micronutrient requirement should be meet.

As well as this, you will also be more sated.

 Despite being aware of this, many find it difficult to be consistently good at implementing this strategy daily.

There can be many reasons for this, time, lack of culinary skill, culture, intolerance, out and out dislike of many foods or food groups, the list goes on.

Making Time

Time, or lack of it, can negatively impact many aspects of our daily routines including meal preparation and exercise.

When we have a lack of time to prepare healthy meals we tend to make poor replacement choices. We might grab a not so nutritious snack from the larder or fridge or order a “take away”.

This is not to say that snacks or takeaways are always the wrong choice, they just need to be the occasional not the normal choice.

Meal planning and preparation is a skill that needs to be acquired or honed. Before shopping for groceries, plan meals and snacks for the week.

Prepare meals in advance, prepare several meals at one time, pre-cook, freeze.

Make packed lunches, salads, bags of trail mix. Everything that can be done in advance will help prevent making poor choices when under pressure. 

If we find it hard to resist something that we know is not the best choice when in a hurry for a snack, probably best that we don’t purchase that something. We can choose a healthier option. If, in a moment of stress, the choice is healthy only, we are likely to go with it. If the choice is “healthy” or “not so healthy but comforting”, sometimes we will give in to the “not so healthy but comforting”.

Another important part of meal prepping is portion size. Many of us are conditioned from an early age to finish our plates of food. When we eat “out” the portions seem bigger than ever now. When we order takeaways for the family, we always seem to over estimate the quantities we need to go around. Rather than eat until we are nearly full we eat until there is nothing left.

The best way to achieve a healthy satiety is to reduce portion size, always plate up the food, sit and eat at a table when possible, chew slowly, take your time within reason and “listen” to your body. When you feel nearly full stop eating. The ritual of preparing and eating from a plate is much more likely to signal to your body that it has been fed. When we grab a bit of this and a mouthful of that, we never get that satisfied feeling that we have eaten.          

Move More

There are many ways to get some form of exercise in during the day even if we don’t have time to get to a planned gym session. When possible, walk or cycle to a destination. Never take the lift or escalator. Have some equipment around that can be picked up and used whenever there is a spare minute or two. Be creative, any spare time is time that can be used productively to make positive health benefits.

Some examples:-

We spend a lot of time at home idling, like waiting for the kettle to boil, the washing machine to finish or just passing time sitting around.

First, be sure to be sufficiently warmed up though. That doesn’t mean that you must spend 5 minutes going through a gentle stretching movement pattern, although it will always help. If you have been moving around and not sitting around you are good to go, just start off slow and controlled and build up.

Do squats or jumping jacks. Go for 3 or more sets of one minute or 20 reps with 30/60 second rest.

Walking lunges with a weight in your hands (tin of beans), see video demo on group page.

Press ups, Planks, on the spot sprinting, all these activities will have positive benefits on your cardiovascular and anabolic metabolism.

I hope I have given you some ideas on how to perhaps make some lifestyle improvements in your quest to live healthier lives.

Feel free to ask any questions you may have, I’ll do my best to answer them.