How Can You Start A Healthier Lifestyle to Lose Weight?
With people having been stuck at home for a long period of time, many of which may still be stuck at home in lockdowns and such, a lot of people are looking for ways to change their lifestyle to be healthier.
There are many ways to get healthier, but it all starts with the will. Having a will and desire to change your life for the better is the number one step to starting a healthier lifestyle, or really starting anything in life.
It’s like thinking you are going to win the Jackpot Capital Bonus if you only ever really play half-heartedly. You need a will, an actual true desire to do something if you want to do it right and do it completely.
Famous author Brandon Sanderson puts it beautifully in his Stormlight Archives book series where he writes about what the most important step a person can take is. He says, one might think it is the first step, but this isn’t true.
Sure, the first step is important, you need to actually start going if you want to do something. However, generally, people don’t have a problem starting things. It doesn’t take much for someone to start doing something.
A moment of inspiration, a moment of guilt, maybe just a moment. People can decide to do something in only a moment. Maybe you were listening to music that got you really pumped up and you had the urge to do as many push-ups as you could.
Maybe you saw the read out on the scale and it made you want to start running. Maybe you really enjoy sports and decided you wanted to try and play football on your school’s team or college’s team or just for fun.
However, the most important step a person can take is not the first one. It is the next step. People tend to be able to start all sorts of things. New Years resolutions, exercising, trying to ditch an addiction, and so on and on.
Yet, a much smaller portion of people is able to continue doing what they set out to. Many people quit in less than a month, and the vast majority of people never make it to 6 months. An even smaller portion to a year.
There are many reasons for this, but the main one is will and desire. People lose their motivation to keep going. They forget about the reason why they started doing what they did, or they forget how they felt before they started.
A smoker might have a large craving for cigarettes. Withdrawal might even make him feel so terrible, he thinks to himself, “Why did I ever quit! I feel even more terrible now than I did when I was smoking!”
Of course, he isn’t thinking about the terrible consequences that smoking will have on his lungs. Even if not now, later in his life. Cancer, trouble breathing, asthma, just to name a few of the issues that come with smoking.
But, how can someone change their life for the better in a way that will last? How can you start a healthier lifestyle in a way that doesn’t make you want to go back to the way you used to live before?
Learn To Cook
I’m going to focus a bit more on diet and exercise than other forms of lifestyle changes, as I think diet and exercise are 2 very commonly ignored parts of people’s lifestyles.
This is why I think the first step for anyone who wants to live a healthier lifestyle is to learn to cook for themselves.
Many people try to start diets but are never able to keep with them. They don’t enjoy their food, they feel hungry more often, and they miss the flavors, textures, and satiation that come with unhealthy or processed foods.
Yet, I feel that many of the problems people find during dieting are in large part due to misconceptions about what it means to have a healthy diet.
When most people think about a healthy diet for losing weight, they think of a big bowl of bland romaine lettuce with a bit of lemon juice, salt, and pepper on it. Maybe some bland chicken breasts to go with it.
Yet, I think this common idea in our society of how a diet should look is a huge disservice to those of us who want to eat a healthier diet and lose weight! Nobody, except people who like a lot of greens, is going to be able to stick to that diet long term.
So, learn to cook for yourself! Learn what sort of nutrients you need to get to your nutrition goals. Find foods that will meet those requirements, and see what you can make from them!
You don’t need to eat bland food for it to be healthy. Healthy foods are delicious and nutritious for you! You just need to find a way to cook them that you really like. And, get a nice spice collection to match it!
Look into the nutrition labels of different foods, or try to cook foods you thought you didn’t like in different ways. You may find that foods you didn’t like were just because you didn’t like how they were cooked.
I like to prove this point by simply saying, “I really enjoy steak, but I wouldn’t want one that was microwaved.” Just because the food was cooked badly, doesn’t make the food itself that you are eating a bad food, or even a food that you might dislike!
A personal example of this for me was broccoli. I really dislike steamed broccoli. That was the only way I had ever tried it before though, so I thought that I really didn’t like broccoli.
Years later, I end up trying broccoli roasted in the oven. I give it a taste and boom! I was really surprised! I really enjoyed it! I found that my problem was how the broccoli was cooked, not the broccoli itself.
So, I would suggest thinking about how you like your food cooked. And maybe going back to some foods you thought you didn’t like and cooking them in a different way. You never know what you might end up seeing that you like!
Friends Until the End
One more tip I will give about starting a healthier lifestyle, is to get someone who also wants to live more healthily, and start to live healthier together. Exercise together, eat together, motivate each other.
This is a very good way to make a change in your life because then you are responsible to someone other than yourself. There is also someone who is responsible for you other than yourself.
If one of you doesn’t feel the most motivated to go to the gym that day or go for that run, the other can help keep you motivated and push you. You become a team, and you push each other to be better.
If you can have more people, even better! Then there are more people that can push each other. You are also more likely to do something if a bunch of people are pushing you than just one. This is a sort of positive use of peer pressure I suppose…
Finally, you simply feel like you are not alone in your journey. There are other people with you that are struggling through the same battles you are! If they can do it, so can you!
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