By guest blogger: Dana Brown of Health Conditions | dana@healthconditions.info
If you think diet and exercise are necessary evils, it’s time to change your perspective. Improving your health shouldn’t be a burden. When it feels like one, it’s that much harder to stay committed to healthy living.
In order to beat obesity and achieve long-term wellness, you need to make healthy choices that you actually enjoy. Don’t think it’s possible? Here are three ways you can live a healthier lifestyle without feeling like you’re sacrificing.
Do Exercise You Enjoy
If exercise feels like a chore, you won’t want to do it. And if you don’t want to exercise, it’s only a matter of time before you abandon your fitness plan. Rather than planning workouts you dread doing, find fitness-focused activities you enjoy.
There are a lot of ways to exercise while also enjoying yourself. Instead of running for cardio, enroll in a spin class with friends, hike challenging trails or join a team sport. To build strength without lifting weights, join a rock climbing gym, take a pole dancing class, or learn a martial art. If you want to become more flexible but don’t enjoy yoga, try gardening or dance to improve mobility.
And before you toss out the idea of a gym membership due to expense, take a moment to review your current health insurance plan. More insurance providers are allowing coverage for fitness centers, which means a membership could be completely covered at no additional cost to you. This also applies to seniors with Medicare Advantage plans. Most Advantage plans, like the ones offered by Humana, provide access to Silver Sneakers memberships. By joining Silver Sneakers, seniors can participate in a variety of senior-friendly exercise programs.
Ditch the Scale
The scale is a great tool for tracking your weight over time. But in the short-term, the scale can do more harm than good.
A person’s weight naturally fluctuates throughout the day. If you’re a woman, you also experience weight fluctuations in correlation with your menstrual cycle. When weighing yourself daily, it’s easy to get focused on these small fluctuations. If you’ve been diligently dieting only to notice your weight spike, MyFitnessPal warns that the emotional fallout could sabotage your progress.
There’s another reason why the scale isn’t that helpful as a weight loss tool: Sometimes when you’re getting healthier, your weight actually goes up. That’s because muscle is denser than fat. If you’re putting on muscle while losing fat, you could see the numbers on the scale go up even as you’re becoming leaner.
There are better ways to track progress than stepping on a scale every day. If weight loss is your primary goal, take measurements and photos and pay attention to how your clothes fit. Aiming to get more fit? Notice how you can run a little farther or lift a little heavier each week, how your body is more flexible, and how you’re less stressed and sleep better on days you’ve exercised. Since these changes are gradual, they’re easy to overlook. Keep a fitness journal so you can track your workouts, energy levels, and moods. Health and Style explains what to record in a fitness journal to reap the greatest benefit.
Eat Intuitively
Meticulously counting every calorie is an effective way to lose weight, but it can also suck all the fun out of eating. If you want to eat better without feeling like you’re dieting, adopt the approach of intuitive eating.
As MindBodyGreen explains, intuitive eating is about letting your instincts guide your eating choices. Intuitive eating doesn’t tell you what to eat or not to eat. Rather, it tells you to eat when you feel hungry, don’t eat when you’re not and pay attention to how different foods make you feel.
To be clear, intuitive eating is not strictly a weight-loss technique. If you have trouble interpreting hunger signals and recognizing when you’re actually hungry and not just bored, upset or dehydrated, you may need to pair intuitive eating with numbers-based tracking until you’re more in tune with your body.
Achieving a healthy lifestyle is a lifelong journey, not something that happens overnight. But if you’re eating foods or doing exercises you don’t like, you won’t stay committed long enough to see results. With these three approaches, you can adopt a healthy lifestyle that you enjoy living.
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