How To Keep Yourself Motivated For A Healthy Lifestyle
How many times have you told yourself that starting from tomorrow, you are going to put all the effort into keeping a healthy lifestyle? The excitement of sticking to the plan for the first couple of days is not a new one for most of us. The problem, however, is the consistency in the long run. Literally, anyone can plan to change their lifestyle for the better, but when it comes to staying motivated and showing commitment over the months, hardly a fraction of us are able to win that battle. Thousands have New Year’s resolutions have failed because people just can’t seem to keep their initial enthusiasm to stick to a healthy lifestyle over a longer period of time.
The thought of keeping a healthy lifestyle and getting the most out of your physical health is surely an exciting one. But how do you fight the despair once you are confronted with a setback, how do you get over the feeling of just giving up and going right back to bed when you should actually be focusing even harder on your goal of keeping a healthy lifestyle? Yes, you guessed it right. Just like pretty much anything else, there are ways that you can employ in order to train your mind to keep its motivation for a healthy lifestyle.
Be it laziness, boredom, lack of results, or trouble finding the motivation, whatever your reason for giving up on the idea of sticking to a healthy lifestyle may be, we have a few simple tips which can greatly increase your chances of success. Let’s not keep you waiting any longer and step into our guide of top 8 strategies which are known to be helpful for the purpose of motivating yourself to keep a healthy lifestyle in the long run.
- Journaling Never Fails
The first and the foremost tip that you can easily start to use from today in hopes of fueling your motivation to keep a healthy lifestyle is journaling the components of healthy lifestyle that you have identified, what you are doing to achieve each one of them, and what are the results that are beginning to show in terms of your physical or mental health. As per psychology, a habit of journaling your experience is likely to motivate you to stick to the idea of a healthy lifestyle.
The idea is quite simple if you think about it. Once you are in the habit of journaling your experiences, you will start to feel a craving to have something to write about at the end of each day. This is the very origin of your motivation for a healthy lifestyle. The thought of not having anything to write about since you didn’t follow the regime and have been cheating on your plan for the whole day is going to make you cringe which will ultimately push you to get moving and focus on achieving your goal of keeping a healthy lifestyle. It may not sound like something that’ll have a huge impact, but you’ve got to try it to believe it.
- Junk Food Prevents The Results
Imagine this, you joined a gym and talked to your coach about getting those gorgeous six-pack abs. You were thoroughly instructed about the workout regime that you need to follow and you make it your life goal to stick to the regime like a religion. You are into the workout program for a couple of months and yet there is hardly any change that you are witnessing on your body. Would you find the motivation to continue the workout for the third month? Probably not. But on the other hand, what if you started to see some real results just at the end of the first month into the workout program? You are perhaps going to be hooked for life and it’ll be a matter of time before you have the impeccable six-pack abs.
The same principle applied here. It is likely that you will fail to see any impact of keeping a healthy lifestyle if you are unable to quit junk food for good. If you are eating the hamburgers and fried chicken most of the times throughout the week, the rest of the effort you are putting into keeping a healthy lifestyle wouldn’t have much of an impact. For starters, therefore, you need to train yourself to part your way from the junk food. It will enable you to witness the positive impact of healthy lifestyle sooner than expected which will fuel the motivation for later by itself.
- Eat In Episodes
Fundamentally speaking, there are two kinds of people that you can find around you. First, are those who take five to six meals each day but all of them are in moderation. Second, are the ones who take excessive pride in having only three meals per day but each of their meal is filled with thousands of calories. You can make a short survey for yourself. Ask the people around you to get an insight into their diet plans and you will find out that the former kind of people are usually fitter, active, lean, and athletic, while the latter are usually the ones who have their belts concealed under their bellies.
In order to ensure that you will be able to witness the results of a healthy lifestyle in a timely fashion, you need to make sure that you are cutting down on each of your meals and are transforming your eating pattern into smaller meals at intervals. For optimum results, what you eat is important, but when you eat and how much of it do you consume is imperative as well.
- Be Humble In Setting Your Goals
There is no argument over the fact that one of the biggest reasons why you find it hard to keep the motivation for a healthy lifestyle is [restrict] the interim failures that most of us are too delicate to get over. The more we can trick our brains into believing that we are being successful, the better it will perform in the field of motivation and inspiration. And what do you think causes the most of interim failures which ultimately push you into giving up? It’s being pompous while setting the goals for yourself.
In order to remedy, it is recommended that you are realistic while setting the goals for a healthy lifestyle for yourself. For instance, if you are starting from today and you have a goal of eating 3 serving of fruits, 2 of vegetables, hit the gym for 2 hours straight, jog for another half an hour, and eat only salad in at least two of your daily meals, it is kind of a given that you will fail miserably. If only we had the strength to start with such a gigantic goal right in the beginning. But unfortunately, we don’t. Therefore, a wise decision would be to keep your goals realistic. Start with incorporating three servings of fruits and two servings of vegetables first. Once it’s a part of your daily routine, then you can move on to adding the next objective, then the next, and so on and so forth.
As you continue to see the success in each of the successive objectives which lead straight to the ultimate goal of keeping a healthy lifestyle, it will become easier for you to keep the motivation for it and keep you moving towards your destination.
- Rewarding Yourself Wouldn’t Hurt
An essential component of keeping yourself motivated for a healthy lifestyle is the periodic rewards. After all, no one wants to live his entire life eating salads and working out at the gym at all times. As humans, we are bound to need a break every once in a while. Regardless of how strongly would, you opinionate against change, it is an innate behavior of mankind to yearn for one at intervals. Therefore, rewarding yourself with something that doesn’t align with your plan of a healthy lifestyle is actually a good way to keep yourself motivated as long as it is done in moderation.
For instance, say that you love hamburgers but your favorite food isn’t exactly suitable for a healthy lifestyle. As mentioned earlier, you are going to have to cut back on the junk food if you want to see the timely results to fuel your motivation. However, once you achieve a checkpoint, it wouldn’t hurt to allow yourself to have a hamburger, say, once every couple of weeks. Like if you have followed your workout regime for two weeks straight, at the end of the second week, you are allowed to treat yourself with your favorite hamburger. A word of caution, though. The reward must be moderate. We are talking about a single hamburger here. If you are going to lose control and end up having 4 of them with extra-large fries and a couple of soft drinks, it will ruin your entire effort for those two weeks in the first place. Simply put, moderation is the keyword here.
- Healthy Lifestyle Without Exercise?
Lastly, as you already would have guessed, there is not a guide on keeping a healthy lifestyle that doesn’t accentuate the importance of keeping yourself physically fit with regular exercise. Remember that when we mention physical exercise, we don’t necessarily mean working out at the gym and lifting heavyweights. Although it’s a good way of shaping and toning your body up to perfection, for the effects of physical fitness to find you, cardiovascular exercises that you can perform at home are sufficient as well. For instance, you could do squats, push-ups, pull-ups, you could get a treadmill and jog a few miles, or perhaps actively swim in your pool for half an hour every day. If you are into sports which require excursion, that should suffice too. For instance, people who are into long tennis or badminton do get their required physical activity for the day with a sports session lasting for a couple of hours.
The best part of physical exercise is that its impact is not confined to physical fitness. It is your mental health that relishes the benefits as well. For instance, physical activities stimulate the production of happy hormones which are known to restore your mood, relieve excessive stress and anxiety, and activate the natural relaxation response of the body to make you feel more at peace. Do yourself a favor and take a look at any guide to promote mental health or perhaps ask a mental health professional and he would surely highlight physical exercise as an important part of optimizing mental health.
Of all the tips mentioned here, sticking to a workout regime is the best reminder that you are focused on keeping a healthy lifestyle. The more you are reminded of your goal, the better are your chances of keeping your motivation.
Finale Note
It is to be kept in mind that regardless of how hard you try, there are going to be a few setbacks. It is next to impossible for you to adopt the idea of a healthy lifestyle today and be all set to follow all of the strategies from tomorrow. The important thing is to make sure that such setbacks don’t push you into utter despair that ultimately makes you quit. Learn to get over the setback and continue on the track again. If you are consistent and patient enough, it can almost be taken for granted that you will eventually get to the point where keeping a healthy lifestyle would end up being a natural part of you and not a deliberate effort that is to put in on a day to day basis. What’s crucial is that you start somewhere at some pace. You will continue to adopt more tips and improve your pace with time just as long as you have it in you to never quit. So, now you know what does it take to stick to a healthy lifestyle. It’s now your time to start the implementation. [/restrict]
