A healthy body makes all the difference to your quality of life, particularly as you age. If you’ve struggled to keep up, have felt tired, stressed, or just generally beaten down, then it’s time to use your New Year’s resolution to help you kickstart your efforts and finally get a handle on your health.
Your Pathway to a Healthier Life
Yes! 2023 can be your year, but to make effective changes, you need to understand what’s holding you back, and then work on removing those temptations while you establish a new routine.
If you stumble, get up. If you fall off the wagon, try again.
It can take a few short weeks all the way to a year to establish a new habit, so keep that in mind when using these tips to upgrade your health and your life in 2023:
Your Diet
If one area of your routine can make a big, immediate impact, it’s your diet. Eat the wrong thing, and you can feel bloated and even be in pain. Eating well, of course, can help you feel good. The best part is that healthy eating helps you feel better in the long term, giving you ongoing benefits that permeate your life.
Of course, improving your diet is one of those difficult tasks that feel impossible actually to maintain. Sure, you can eat well for a brief period, but you slip into old habits once things start getting hectic and stressful. Unhealthy eating is easy, which is one of the main reasons why it’s such a problem.
Eating a better diet is the first course of action, but there are other solutions out there to help you, too, like this after-eating digestive enzyme to help you better absorb the food you eat and minimize issues like gas or indigestion.
These digestive supplements and boosters work better when the food you eat has a high nutritional content, for example. In fact, every part of your health, including medication and other treatments, will improve if you start eating healthier.
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Clear Up Your Kitchen
The first step to any healthy eating journey is to get rid of the temptations at home. If you’re tired at the end of the day and have the choice between an unhealthy ready meal, chances are you aren’t going to take the time to make yourself a balanced dinner properly. This doesn’t mean that you’re doomed to slave away in the kitchen, but you will need to prepare a few things in advance to make it easier to be healthy.
Not only will removing those unhealthy snacks and other processed instant meals help encourage you to adopt better habits faster, but it can also help you kick food withdrawal sooner. Foods that are high in fats, sugars, and salt can be addictive, meaning you can experience cravings and even symptoms of withdrawal when you finally go cold turkey. Unlike other addictive substances, of course, food withdrawal is not dangerous and is fairly quick to beat.
Once you kick those cravings, eating healthier will become so much easier.
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Prep Healthy Snacks
You’ll need snacks if you want to eat healthier and stay fueled throughout the day. The issue with snacks normally is that they’re processed or baked goods packed full of sugar and salt. By making your own, even if you make the same items (like a breakfast bar), you’ll be sparing yourself a lot of unnecessary calories.
You will need to find a recipe that ramps up the nutritional content, but with just a little prep work, you can start making some truly delicious, homemade snacks that will keep you fueled and healthy.
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How to Prep Meals
Snacks are a good area to start with, particularly if they can be kept for over a week or stored in the freezer. The reason you want to start with snacks is so that you can fuel up if you feel hungry or tired and don’t have a meal ready at hand.
The next step is, of course, to then start prepping meals. There are several different ways that you can approach this. You can prep your every meal for the week in advance, so all you need to do is reheat it and eat it. This, of course, can be very difficult for those who just don’t want to eat the same thing every day.
Though you will need to do at least some meal prep to make healthy eating a breeze, the prep you end up doing may look like creating a sauce to use throughout the week, marinating meats and vegetables, or even putting ingredients together in a crock pot or slow cooker at the start of your day.
Whenever you do make any meal, it’s also a good idea to make enough for there to be leftovers. You can remix a lot of different foods enjoyably this way. Say you have steak and potatoes for dinner. Fry that up in the morning with some eggs, and you have a great breakfast. If you made rice for a side, you could then use that for your lunch.
There are so many ways that you can remix leftovers into something delicious with minimal effort. For example, grilled vegetables can be blended together and then made into a soup. Leftover fish can be picked apart for a seafood pasta meal.
The only thing you need to keep in mind when it comes to meal prep is when things go off. You can write down when you put in a container of leftovers with some masking tape and a marker, for example. This way, you can keep track of what needs to be eaten by what date. Not only will this help you make healthy eating easier, but it will also cut down on your food waste.
Your Sleep
You’ll also want to work on improving the quality of sleep. Though second on this list, this tip can be done first or concurrently with the others on the list. To start, you will want to analyze your bedroom space and make a few improvements.
One of the biggest reasons why you may not be sleeping well is that your bed is too small for yourself and your partner. If you two are constantly waking up because you bumped into each other, or if one of you snores and keeps the other up, then there will be issues in your sleep cycle, and your relationship.
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Upgrade Your Sleep Setup
Before you try anything else, it’s important to be at least aware of the issues and the fixes. If you two struggle sharing one blanket, simply get two duvets. If snoring is an issue, then consider
having one person sleep in another room. Your sleep is critical. Being away from one another for just one night is not a dealbreaker in any relationship. If you both can sleep more deeply; as a result, your relationship will likely improve.
The quality of the mattress, the size of the mattress, and even the material of the bedsheets can all make an impact. In general, you’ll want to choose materials that are breathable. Breathable fabrics like linen or wool can significantly affect your body’s ability to regulate temperature when you sleep.
The lighting will also play a part. If you live in an urban area, don’t underestimate how harmful it can be to have a street light on in your bedroom. Getting blackout curtains can help with this, though if you want to make waking more natural, you’ll want to follow up on that purchase with a daylight lamp. These lamps slowly turn brighter before your set alarm, so you can naturally “wake up” with the day.
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Be Consistent
The best tip, however, is to be consistent. If you ever go through a period where you sleep at the same time every day and wake up at the same time every day, you’ll notice that your internal clock starts to get the memo. Even with an alarm in the morning, you’ll wake up on time.
Even without looking at the time, you’ll start to feel tired. By being consistent, you can train your body to know when to sleep. This in turn will help you sleep more deeply.
Upgrade Your Exercise
Bone density drops as you get older. Everything, in fact, gets more difficult as you get older. That’s why exercise is so important – but you do need to be careful. While exercise of any form is great, doing intensive options (particularly without the right training or guidance) can put your body and health in danger.
For example, if you are a senior, your exercises should focus primarily on low-impact options. Swimming, for example, is a great low-impact cardio option that you can adopt. As for improving your flexibility and balance, look to yoga. Even with these low-impact options, you will need to work your way up through the intensity. Starting with beginner’s classes so that you can retrain or learn the proper stances is a must.
As you build up strength and cardio, you can start doing many more things, even if you’re already in retirement age. Getting fit and healthy is essential for everyone, at any age, and can help you enjoy a far greater standard of living. Just keep in mind that slow and steady wins this race. You need to give your body the time to adapt to workout intensities.
An hour of exercise once a week isn’t better than short 15-minute exercises once a day. While you should work your way up to half an hour to an hour of daily exercise, don’t rush. Wait until your body adapts, so you can keep going without hurting yourself.
Your Mental Health
Mental health is a crucial, but often misunderstood, element of our health. The reason it’s last on this list is simply so that you can strike off physical ailments as the cause for how you are feeling. A low mood and lethargy can be because of your diet and lifestyle. A poor diet can also exacerbate many common mental illnesses. By improving your physical health, you’ll get a far more accurate baseline that you can then work with.
When it comes to mental health, one key secret is understanding what seed your illness stemmed from. No, understanding the cause isn’t a cure-all, but it can help you rationalize it and establish an effective approach to managing and treating it.
Caring for your mental health isn’t just for when you are ill. Work on finding a balance that helps you feel invigorated emotionally and mentally. This can mean making more time for the things that bring you joy, or cutting off toxic people from your life. Do what it takes to be content so that you can upgrade and get the most out of your life.
Scientific References
https://www.webmd.com/diet/ss/slideshow-sugar-addiction
https://wellbeing-project.org/9-tested-tips-to-improve-your-wellbeing-and-quality-of-life-post/
https://orthoinfo.aaos.org/en/staying-healthy/healthy-bones-at-every-age/
https://nigms.nih.gov/education/fact-sheets/Pages/circadian-rhythms.aspx
