You can roll the dice on a lot of things without much serious risk. Leaving the house without an umbrella, for instance, on a day with a 50 percent chance of rain. But when it comes to maintaining good health, you should never leave your body to chance. Effort and knowledge play huge roles in your overall health and how you choose to eat or stay fit.
Choice, Not Chance
Maintaining good health is consistently paired with making intentional, daily decisions about staying active, eating healthy, and more. If you’re having a stressful day, you may not think or even care about what you eat for lunch or dinner, or the snacks in between meals. If you opt for eating something easy and on the fly, it usually means fast foods high in fat, carbs, and calories. Pairing that with skipping a workout and you’re outright rejecting any number of healthier options.
While a burger and fries may satisfy you in the moment, the positives are greatly outweighed by the empty calories and large salt intake. And as you may have experienced before, even one day off your normal workout routine can easily become two, three days, or even an entire week! We can’t make perfect choices all the time, but being aware of the choices we’re making, and how often, is key to keeping us on the right path of maintaining good health.
A Gamble You Can’t See
One of the major reasons we choose to gamble with maintaining good health is that the results from making poor diet choices aren’t immediately visible. Eat pizza one day and you may not see changes in your appearance. Eat pizza for a week or longer without getting in your exercise, and get ready to see (and feel) the setbacks.
The point is to not let one roll of the dice lead to one after the other. In pretty short order, bad choices can turn into a regular gig, making it that much harder to get back to a healthier lifestyle.
Schedules and Planning
As basic as it may sound, a great way to maintain good health is to make – and stick to – a plan. Creating meals for the week so that you’re never far away from a ready-to-go meal is something a lot of people do. Your chances of sticking to the regimen are increased if you cook and prepare your weekly meals as soon as you get back home with your groceries. All your meats, vegetables, grains and more are already out in front of you. If you put everything away, you are more likely to forget or shrug off the responsibility and utter the dreaded phrase, “I’ll do it later.”
Keeping to a fitness routine – before or after work – can be rough at first but once you’re in the rhythm of it, you’ll come to rely on that schedule. The best motivation is to simply start, adjusting your schedule if needed, and making a commitment. Life is going to throw you curveballs, but learning to adapt will keep you moving forward.
Not one person has ever won the “genetic lottery,” so to speak. As we learned earlier this month elsewhere on our blog, we each store fat differently and enter this world with some sort of disposition to potential disease or certain rate of metabolism. Instead of taking chances with your health the next time you feel like indulging, remember that the key to a healthy lifestyle is doing your best to stick to it.