Table of Contents
Eat whole natural foods.
Get 7-8 hours of sleep per night.
Move your body throughout the day.
Exercise 3-4 times per week.
Take some time to relax.
We all know these things are good for us and will improve and maintain our health.
But that is not easy to do…
Why Is It So Hard to Make Healthy Choices?
Around every corner is tasty, delicious, calorically dense processed foods that hijack our appetites and make it easy to overconsume.
Staying up for another hour to watch another episode of a TV series seems so tempting, and happens automatically, the streaming service just serves it up for us automatically.
There is no need to move your body because everything you need to survive can be delivered right to your door any time of the day.
Exercise…who has time for exercise? Plus I am tired because I haven’t slept and the highly processed food zaps your energy.
Relax? Who has time to relax when you have kids activities, work deadlines, and 24 hour news cycles constantly telling us how the world is on the verge of disaster?
The battle most people face when it comes to making changes to their health does not have to do with not knowing what to do, IT’S ACTUALLY DOING IT!
Unfortunately the Nike slogan “Just do it!” doesn’t work either because our world is set up to work against us; it is far too easy and convenient to do things that detract from our health rather than improve our health.
Our Environment and Biology Are Working Against Us
It is not just that our world is set up to work against us, we are wired to do many of the things that detract from our health because thousands of years ago they weren’t detrimental to our health…THEY HELPED US SURVIVE!
What?!? That doesn’t make sense!
Let me explain…
Unlimited calories like we have today would have been a godsend thousands of years ago when calories were not guaranteed.
Keeping a lookout for potential threats was a necessity so that we did not become a predator’s dinner. Today with “threats” all around us and news and social media constantly putting those threats in our face 24 hours a day we end up in a constant state of stress.
Thousands of years ago we didn’t move unless we had to because we didn’t want to waste energy unnecessarily. If you wasted energy and didn’t have enough energy to find food then you could die. Today we don’t have to move anymore to survive so we don’t!
It is in our nature, it is built into our genetics to do these things!
So how do we overcome this challenge when our environment and survival instincts are working against us?
Shifting Your Mindset: Avoiding All-or-Nothing Thinking
My first suggestion is to remove black or white thinking.
It’s not salad OR pizza, both can still be on the menu. No one expects you to never eat pizza again. However instead of just consuming pizza a better approach would be to have the salad, pizza, and a protein. You will get far more nutrition, be much more full, and consume far less pizza (and calories) than you would otherwise.
The same thing can apply to physical activity, movement, and sleep.
You don’t need to give up playing video games if you like doing that but it is not a good idea for all your free time to be spent playing them. Instead a better idea would be to tell yourself you can play video games AFTER you have done your exercise AND that when you do play that you take a break every hour to move your body OR limit yourself to just one hour.
No one is telling you that you need to completely eliminate these things from your life and ALWAYS choose the healthy alternative. If you really want to keep some of these things in your life, that is fine, we just need to shift the balance towards the practices that you know serve your health rather than detract from it so you end up with a net win.
Finding What Works for You
My second suggestion is to find health practices that you actually enjoy, can stick to, and fit into your life that way you are more likely to stick with them and don’t slip back into old habits.
If you don’t like salads, can we find another vegetable that you do like?
If you don’t like resistance training with barbells and dumbbells can we try a TRX, your body weight, or resistance bands?
If you find walking boring could we spice it up by listening to an audiobook or podcast?
If meditation is not something you are interested in doing to help manage stress could you do some gentle yoga or tai chi instead? Maybe you could do a puzzle or build some legos?
Just because the latest fad or influencer says THIS IS THE WAY doesn’t mean that it is the only way.
There are always multiple ways to reach your health and wellness goals and some ways will work for you and some won’t. People have achieved their health and wellness goals using all kinds of approaches. Some of them conform with the mainstream narrative around health others don’t. Some people use a mix of mainstream and contrarian approaches.
In order to shift the balance of habits that serve your health and wellness goals away from the ones that detract from your health you first need to realize that this does not have to turn your life upside down. You can still have the pizza, you can still play video games, you can still stay up late, you just have to do less of those things and more of the choices that improve your health.
In order to do less of the things that detract from your health you need to find a diet you enjoy eating, a movement practice you enjoy doing, a way of exercising that is enjoyable and sustainable, stress management practices that you can actually stick so, and a sleep schedule and practice that works for you and your lifestyle.
Progress Over Perfection: Embracing Setbacks and Learning
This won’t be easy and it won’t be quick.
It will take a long time, you will have setbacks, you will fall back into old habits.
That is OK because you are learning. Everytime you fail or fall back into old habits that means you found something that didn’t work for you and you know to move on to something else.
How I Can Help: Free Resources for Your Health Journey
This is where the content I (and others) create comes in. My content is ultimately meant to help you discover new and interesting ways to develop a healthier lifestyle. Some of my suggestions may not work for you, they may not stick, but again that means you learned something new and that you can try something else. Best of all, my content is all free. So if you are looking for ways to better integrate the health practices you know you should be doing into your life, sign up for my newsletter using the form below and I will email you all my content for free each week.