Do you want to be fit and healthy?
Many people wants to eat better or achieve a healthier weight. Well actually one can achieve this goal by eating the right food combinations because there are a variety of heart healthy, delicious meals for both meat eaters and vegetarians to help you achieve a balance between diet and exercise. Whatever a person’s weight, stress and hectic schedules can cause imbalances in how one sleeps and exercise. This can lead to illness and many unwanted medical conditions. So taking control over your environment by cooking and choosing foods differently is the key to success. If you want to be fit and healthy, you must take charge of your diet, health and weight through cooking and lifestyle change.
1. Change now: The process of changing for your health
Whether you are trying to lose weight, lower your blood sugar levels, exercise or just eat healthier, you must have a major lifestyle change.
There are stages of change. At first you are not yet thinking about change. Sometimes the contemplative process starts when doctor points out that you have deteriorating health problems but can be cured by lifestyle change. For now, probably you are interested or are being intrigued by what you have heard about foods for health and being physically fit. Probably reading about how food choices and exercise benefits your health or hearing about it from a family, friend or doctor has stimulated your interest in starting change for yourself. At this stage, you are getting motivated, thinking about your goals and asking yourself what you want to get out of this change. To start your journey, you must be PREPARED. You are ready to take action once you have thought about your motivations and goals. During preparation, you take steps to prepare for new eating and related lifestyle habits. You need to buy new food and do exercise. You need to look at your schedule to see where you might fit in time to shop, plan meals, and cook. Then take ACTION. This stage is the exciting part. You are learning to cook in new ways, select new foods, and exercise regularly and consistently. You are beginning to see the results of your work. After doing moths of all these lifestyle changes, you need to MAINTAIN it. This is the stage at which eating and being fit becomes a way of life. As you progress, you may add new foods and exercises to your routine and new activities to your life.
2. Tracking change
Your emotions, values and confidence are the main areas to look at when making change.
Check your emotions by asking yourself how do you and your family feel about you making changes. Also look if you sabotage success after every daily crisis. To check for your values try to tell yourself what food, love, comfort, reward and punishment means to you. If you connect food with these feelings, it will be harder to want to give up. Lastly , ask yourself if you are confident that you can change or not because you must be confident in order to achieve your goal.
3. Setting weekly goals
You can chose of how many pounds you want to lose per week. Use the following format to help you organize your schedule
Month:______________
Week 1: (example: get rid of junk foods)
Week 2: (example: do physical activities and limit your eating)
Week 3:
Week 4:
4. Challenge yourself
Make sure you consistently eat foods rich in nutrients. Most fast food lacks nutrient density and have calories without real nutritional value. It is easy to eat instant foods such as chocolate bars but it doesn’t contain the right balance of all vital nutrients. However, eating convenient foods is fine once in a while, but is should not be substituted for a well-balanced diet. Remember, the most important natural foods to eat are whole grains, vegetables, fruit, low fat milk, fish or meats and also beans.
5. Don’t forget to also condition your emotions
Stress can have an effect on how we eat because it involves hormonal changes in the body. These hormonal changes affects how we eat, how we think and how we feel. You should recover from stress once you experience it by trying to relax and avoiding it. If we do not give ourselves time to recover from stressful events, our body might be forced to become sick.
6. Forget your old habits
First, identify those bad old habits of yours that are linked to negative eating that keeps you overeating. Your family, friends or doctor may all try to help you eat better but ultimately you alone must do it. If you have a habit of sleeping late at night, change that and get plenty of rest. Now, plan your meals and snacks and EAT SLOWLY. When eating, turn off all distractions like television. Why? Because food commercials may increase your desire to eat.
7. Get your reward
If you make gradual changes consistently, then you may have physically good looking body, improvement of energy, better sleeping patterns and even good relationship with other people may improve. All of these are only some of the rewards awaiting you if you do your system constantly.
Medicine Life 