Gateway Habits for Long Term Health
Part of being healthy is maintaining a healthy weight.
A healthy weight isn’t about being skinny.
It’s about ensuring that you’re not burdening your body with excess fat. One indication that excess body fat is being accumulated is when your clothes start fitting tighter.
When your favorite jeans are no longer comfortable,
resist the urge to blame the dryer for shrinking them!
Your jeans are telling you it’s time to evaluate what you’ve been eating and how much you’re moving your body.
Sometimes life deals us a tough hand and eating right and getting enough exercise just isn’t in the cards. That’s okay for the short term. No need to get down on yourself, it happens to everyone at some point. But you have to take charge of your health before things spiral out of your control.
If you want to get healthy and drop a couple of dress sizes without trying a new fad diet or an extreme bootcamp fitness class, here are some quick and easy ways that worked for me:
1. Identify your top 3 biggest food sins.
Then commit to cutting at least 2 of them out of your life for 8 weeks.
We’re creatures of habit. We have a tendency to eat the same things day in and day out. Chances are that parts of your diet are just fine so there’s no need for a major overhaul. But other parts of your diet may be sabotaging you.
Here’s how to identify your food sins:
What did you have for meals and snacks over the last week? Be honest about this!
What foods do you eat that are high in animal saturated fats?
What about sodium content?
Is sugar your devil?
How often do you eat at restaurants or order take-out? Those foods are always crammed with fat, salt, and often sugar too.
Did you know that not more than 10% of your daily calories
should come from sugar or saturated fat? And to keep salt under control,
use no more than 2300mg of sodium per day.
With this information in mind your food sins come to light quickly!
When I coached a friend who needed to make changes to his diet, I told him to assume everything, no matter how healthy it was being marketed, everything that’s boxed, canned, or bagged has salt or sugar added, and usually both.
Always check the nutrition content and double check the serving size.
Food companies will often trick us into thinking a food is okay by listing a low sodium content, then you look at the serving size and 2 potato chips equals one serving! Nobody eats just 2 potato chips! This trick is widely used, so beware.
My 1st food sin was pizza and my 2nd sin was fried chicken- not on the same night, but at least 3 times a week I’d order pizza or have some fried chicken. I’d eat those sodium-laden saturated fat-soaked main courses and then I’d have the left overs for lunch.
My 3rd food sin was eating ice cream almost every night after dinner. I gave up pizza and fried chicken, but I wasn’t going to give up ice cream too! Instead, I ate a much smaller portion, the actual advertised serving size (just 4 ounces), not half the pint.
2. Think ahead and meal plan.
Identify when it’s hard to eat right, then make it easy.
If you read the above paragraph and did the calculation then you know I was having fried chicken or pizza for at least 1 meal upwards of 6 times a week! Cutting those 2 main courses out of my diet meant I needed to have replacements. But to start, I needed to understand why I chose them in the first place.
I needed to dig deeper than “they taste good”.
Sometimes I would work long hours with customers. I didn’t always have the opportunity to eat a whole meal for lunch. This led to my blood sugar dropping. I was often hangry after work! I’d be consumed with hunger.
I’d order pizza from work then drive home and meet the delivery person outside my door. Or I’d drive from work to the grocery store. I’d buy the fried chicken from the deli, get in the car, and eat a leg in the car before driving home.
The fix:
I started bringing easy healthy snacks to work like a bag of nuts, hummus, cut up veggies, dried fruit, high fiber crackers, cheese, avocados, and bananas. That way if my job didn’t allow me to take a full lunch, I could at least pop into the breakroom and munch on something to tide me over to my next meal.
Once my blood sugar stopped dropping, I was able to make wiser choices for dinner. I learned a couple of quick healthy recipes to replace pizza and fried chicken. I made sure that my refrigerator was stocked so that I could drive straight home and make a good meal.
Once I started cooking more, I learned that if I always had certain ingredients in my pantry, freezer, or refrigerator, it’s easy to whip up something that’s quick and healthy to eat.
3. Assess how much activity you do and start doing more.
Finding just 20 minutes a day to focus on moving around will tremendously boost your fitness.
Before I started paying attention to my activity levels, I had a pretty relaxed attitude about exercise. On the weekends I might go to the lake and take a leisurely swim. Maybe I’d go for a walk on a nice day. Those activities were enjoyable but they weren’t really much of a cardio workout. I was taking in many more calories than I was burning.
The reality is that most of us don’t get enough exercise.
There are a ton of options to help you get started. There are apps that will help you count your footsteps. There are beginner aerobics classes on demand that come with most cable packages. There are hundreds of YouTube fitness videos online.
Whatever gets you moving every day, use it and do it!
The more intense your new activity, the less time you need to find for it. Start with 20 minutes of activity daily and over the eight-week period work up to an hour per day. Mix it up, switch things around, but do something active every day.
When you set aside time to focus on yourself and your health, your spirits lift.
You start feeling more positive. You think more clearly. And when you first start getting active, your body goes through more noticeable dramatic changes. These are the rewards to keep in mind when you get lazy.
It’s easy to say you don’t have the time, but you really do. You just have to prioritize yourself and your health over the things that drain away your time without giving you any real benefits.
So, what are your food and/or beverage sins? Is it having 2 or 3 beers after work? Is it 2 or 3 fancy coffees per day with plenty of cream and sugar? Is it the morning doughnut?
Whatever your food sins are, sub in something healthy and get moving!
Tell yourself it’s just for 8 weeks. You may find (like I did) that after 8 weeks you prefer your substitutions and love the results of having more energy, feeling stronger, and being in charge of your health! And your favorite jeans will be comfy again.
© Cherie Fournier 2021