New Year, Healthier You!
It’s that time again. It’s a new year and time to make your New Year’s resolutions. Each year almost one in three make resolutions to better themselves by loosing weight, stopping smoking, start exercising, etc. A study performed in 2007 identified that 88% of those that set New Years resolutions fail. Wow! That is a lot of failure. But I’m sure we all have been there; I know I have. There are a lot of reasons for failure including men setting broad goals such as “loose weight” as opposed to “loose 2 pounds per week.” Setting too many goals and/or unrealistic goals are also common reasons of failure. On the other hand, women were found to be more successful when they made their goals public and were able to get support from their friends.
Healthier Self-Image
Most of us decide to loose weight because we don’t like a certain aspect of our bodies. For example we think our thighs are too fat, arms are too flabby, stomach is too big, or we are overall too heavy. The problem with this train of thought is that we are “fixing” something because we don’t like the way it looks, and then when we “fix” one of these another one becomes more evident. I fell into this myself. I was working out continually trying to loose weight. When I had lost enough weight, I didn’t like my legs. Then when they became more muscular, I didn’t like my arms. It never ended! I was never happy with myself. It is important to first appreciate that you are yourself and learn to love yourself first. I have found the daily reflections of Leo Babauta at ZenHabits.net to be helpful.
Healthier Life Style
Once we have learned to appreciate who we are as individuals, we can make the decision to lead a healthier lifestyle. We all have reasons for changing our lifestyle. Unfortunately most of the time it takes an event, such as a heart attack or a doctor telling us to loose weight, before we decide to make a change. We tend to flock to diets and the new fad. The problem with these is that the results are temporary. Once we come into temptation or start to eat the “not allowed food” or stop buying the supplement we loose all the results and feel like a failure. Let’s make the important decision to be a healthier you. A healthy lifestyle includes healthy eating and exercise. The plan provided by Beachbody’s 21 Day Fix has worked for me and a lot of others. But if you don’t want to follow a meal plan follow these rules for your new diet:
- Clean eating: is a deceptively simple concept. … At its simplest, clean eating is about eating whole foods, or “real” foods — those that are un- or minimally processed, refined, and handled, making them as close to their natural form as possible.
- Proper portion sizes: Check out this hand guide for proper serving sizes.
- Eat frequent meals/snacks: Eat 3 meals and 2-3 snacks per day to keep your body energized and burning calories throughout the day. Make sure to include lean protein, vegetables, fruit, and complex carbohydrates for each meal.
- Drink Water: Drink at least half your body weight in ounces per day
- Eliminate sugars and sodas: simple as that. Be careful of sugar substitutes. I like Stevia, it’s naturally occurring with little to no glycemic index.
Healthier You
This year let’s make a resolution we can stick to: Men make sure you set specific and small goals. Women make sure you tell your friends/family your resolutions. Let’s first learn to appreciate our individuality and make the decision to lead a healthier lifestyle including a clean eating diet and exercise.
