Building a healthy lifestyle doesn’t happen overnight… like anything worth having, it takes time, effort, and commitment. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth the effort! These are my top 5 tips to building a healthy and balanced lifestyle.
- Eat Real Food– A healthy, balanced diet revolves around whole, natural foods that nourish your body. Some of my favorite ‘clean’ foods are strawberries, blueberries, sweet potatoes, apples, oranges, bananas, chia seeds and avocados! Hey, if it was good enough for Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, it’s good enough for ME!
- Watch Your Portions– We all know that ‘healthy’ food is the foundation of a ‘healthy’ diet, but in order to look and feel your best, you need to practice portion control. Sure, organic peanut butter is filled with nourishing fat and plants based protein, but eating a jar of it is NOT healthy.
- Eat a Balanced Diet– Now that you are eating the RIGHT foods, it’s important to eat a varied and balanced diet. So go ahead… eat carbs!! People think that carbs and sugars are the enemy, but if you’re eating a ‘whole foods diet’ filled with the RIGHT carbs, you can treat yourself to all nature has to offer! My favorites? A bit of frozen mango and frozen chopped banana for dessert! It tastes like dessert!
- Be Consistent- Sure, a Juice Cleanse or Detox Diet may be ‘all the rage’ right now, but is it really sustainable? If you want to focus on building a balanced lifestyle, then you need to start building healthy habits that you can stick to. I can’t stress this enough. Habits make ‘eating healthy’ easy. They make it so you don’t have to rely solely on willpower to prevent you from devouring that tray of cookies. When you eat regular meals and snacks, you prevent overeating since you keep your blood sugar levels stable. Aim to eat on a consistent schedule so that you don’t get hungry (and overeat later.)
- Be Active!- No, I’m not about to tell you that you need to sign up for a marathon, but you DO need to focus on ways that you can be active everyday. Take the stairs, go for a walk, and do some light stretching before bed. All these little things really do add up!
These are my 5 tips to building a healthy lifestyle! If you slip up and eat something you didn’t intend to, or if you just plain eat too much, don’t stress about it! Just forgive yourself and start again! Each day is a new beginning!
How about you? What are you favorite ways to live and maintain a healthy lifestyle?
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