How to Live a Healthy Lifestyle

Building healthy habits and living a healthy lifestyle can seem like a lot of work, but it doesn’t have to be. In fact, with the 10 simple healthy living tips below, you can start living a healthier life pretty easily!

To make the journey even easier, try finding something that will keep pushing you toward a healthy lifestyle. Maybe you want to set a good example for your kids, maybe you want to have more energy throughout the day, or maybe it’s something else.

Whatever it is, keep it in your mind at all times to remind yourself why you started on this journey!

10 Tips for a Healthy Lifestyle

1. Eat Home-Cooked Meals

By cooking your own meals at home, you’ll have a lot more control over the ingredients you use meaning you can eat healthier and you can shop according to what’s on sale. It’s beneficial for your health and your wallet.

Also, you don’t have to slave away for hours in the kitchen in order to eat a healthy home-cooked meal. No one has time for that! Instead, you can have a healthy meal on the table in 30-minutes or less with these 30-minute meal ideas or these quick and healthy instant pot recipes.

2. Plan Your Meals

This is one of the most important healthy living tips on this list as it will help you eat better and save even more time and money on meals.

By simply planning out your meals every week, you can make sure you get the right serving sizes, proper nutrients, and you can plan your meals based on ingredients that are cheap at the time.

Plus, you won’t have to worry about “what’s for dinner” every single day of the week. Yay!

If you want to save even more time, try cooking your meals in bulk so that you’ll have leftovers for later! Healthy freezer meals are another great option!

3. Drink More Water

Staying hydrated is extremely important for healthy living. You should always try to get the recommended amount of water every day. For adults, that means about 8, 8-ounce servings of water per day.

If you’re not getting enough water each day you may experience lower energy levels, headaches, and other problems. Luckily, once you build some good habits getting the proper water intake each day is pretty easy!

One of the best ways to stay hydrated all day long is to carry a water bottle with you at all times. This is seriously so easy to do and once you start you won’t be able to live without your water bottle by your side!

If you’ve been using a bottle and you’re still struggling to stay hydrated all day long.

4. Make Exercise Fun

Here’s the thing about exercise: If it’s not fun, it feels like a chore. If it feels like a chore, you probably won’t want to do it!

However, exercising is SO important for your mental and physical health so you should try to find a way to incorporate it into your life without it feeling like a chore.

Some ways to do that would be to start exercising with a friend, join a class (like body pump for example), and most importantly, find something you enjoy doing! If you love playing tennis, play tennis! If you love being in the water, try pool exercises!

Once you find a way to get exercise doing something you enjoy, it will become a regular part of your routine and you’ll actually start looking forward to it.

5. Go for a Walk

Continuing from the tip above, walking is one of the most enjoyable ways to get exercise. When you’re out in nature breathing in the fresh air it just has a way of calming your mind, but maybe that’s just me!

If you want to make it even more fun, get a friend to join you and turn it into a walk and talk!

6. Get a Good Sleep

Sleep is one of the most important things for our bodies and our minds. According to HealthNavigator.org, lack of sleep can cause:

• Daytime sleepiness
• Headaches
• Poor memory
• Anxiety and depression

As an adult, you should be getting around 7-9 hours of sleep each day so try to stick to that! It obviously won’t be possible every night as your life is busy but one of the best ways to ensure a healthy sleep is to go to bed and wake up at the same time every day.

To make this easier, try to come up with a bedtime routine, like reading a book before bed. It’s also important to avoid any screen-time at least an hour before bed.

7. Stand Up

If you work in an office or in some job where you’re sitting for the majority of your day, it’s extremely important to maintain proper posture. You should also try to get up and move around every 30 minutes or so to get your blood flowing.

By sitting too much and for too long at a time, you could have an increased risk of heart disease, you’ll gain weight more easily, you could harm your back, and that’s only a few of the issues you could face.

Source: WebMD.com

8. Put Your Phone Down

In this day and age, we all know how addicting social media can be. It’s like an infinite black hole of interesting content that we just get sucked into.

Most of the time it’s pretty harmless, but sometimes it goes a bit too far and we end up spending TOO much time on our phones. That’s when it can start having negative effects.

If you find yourself scrolling through your phone for hours at a time or right when you wake up, that may be a sign of social media addiction.

If you find that you may be addicted to social media and you think it could be affecting your health, it might be time for a social media detox.

9. Meditate

Meditation is interesting. Some people find it downright silly. However, it has a lot of scientifically proven benefits and it’s great for your mental and physical health. According to Science of People, meditating can:

• Reduce your stress
• Improve your focus and memory
• Make you more creative
• Improve your cardiovascular health

All of those benefits can be achieved in just ten minutes per day! If you’re willing to try meditating, start off easy by using an app such as Headspace or Calm for guided meditations.

If you find that meditation isn’t for you, you can still benefit from a calming hobby such as drawing or coloring. It’s always good to just let your brain rest and be creative every once in a while.

10. Spend Time with Family and Friends

This is an obvious one but it’s important to include! Spending time with family and friends is what life is all about and it’s great for your wellbeing.

So, don’t be afraid to take a break sometimes to spend it with your loved ones! You could even take a stay-at-home day for a full day of family fun.

Conclusion

Maintaining a healthy lifestyle doesn’t have to be a chore. If it’s important to you and you dedicate yourself to it, you should actually find that it gets easier and easier as more time goes on.

Eventually, you won’t even be able to imagine living any other way! You’ll feel healthier, more energized, more focused, and you’ll be happier than ever.