healthy lifestyle

10 Ways to Motivate Yourself to Start a Healthy Lifestyle

June 6, 2019 by Martha Minniti

10 Ways to Motivate Yourself to Start a Healthy Lifestyle

No matter what age you and if you’re feeling like you’ve been neglecting yourself, stressed, burnt out or not the best version of yourself it’s never too soon or too late to start a healthy lifestyle.

Practice Self Care

I want to start first with self care. This is taking care of your mind, soul and body. This is the basis for everything else I cover here and doing this will help make all of the pieces fall together easier.

Self care isn’t just a single activity. It encompasses everything else on the list below. It means that you practice self care daily and make it a priority. When you do this you have energy and the mindset to tackle everything that comes your way.

There are many ways you can practice self care, meditating, eating nutritious meals, exercising daily or making sure you find a quiet time every day among others. Pick things that you enjoy doing that are healthy.

When you start and get in the habit of living a healthier life, you will reap a lot of benefits. Not just your body but your mind and soul as well.

Starting a healthy lifestyle is easy but sustaining it is where the real challenge lies. Think back to all of those New Year’s Resolutions you made like going to the gym, eating healthier and giving up sugar. You began with good intentions and somehow life got in the way and you stopped doing them.

There are always lots of excuses to skip doing things that you know are healthy. So next time procrastination rears its ugly head or that voice inside of you starts telling you can’t or shouldn’t here’s 10 ways to motivate yourself.

1. Have Written Goals

Start small and add more goals as you make progress. Don’t try to do it all at once. It takes time to turn them into habits. Try creating queues that remind you to do something from your goal list daily.

For example if you want to exercise daily lay out your clothes the night before and them put them on the next morning as a queue to exercise.

2. Have a vision board.

Practicing the law of attraction and having a vision board is another powerful tool to keep you motivated. Put it where you can see it first thing and during the day as a reminder of your goals.

Include photos of your goal and any motivational words or images. Fill your board with meaningful cues.

Look at it daily, even multiple times a day and whenever you feel like you are slipping back to your old habits, as a reminder of what you really want. This will help keep you working towards your dream.

3. Focus on one new habit at a time

As I mentioned in #1, you want to start small and work your way to adding more goals.

Who hasn’t tried piling on a bunch of goals at once and then didn’t accomplishing anything?

This is why it is important to choose one new habit/goal and work on achieving before adding another one from your list.

Start small and focus your willpower on one goal and you’ll have a higher chance for success.

4. Break Down Your Goals

If you have a big goal you want to achieve, it can be overwhelming. One way to get out of overwhelm and into action is to break it down into smaller victories (smaller goals). Doing this will give you the motivation to keep moving forward.

Choose to do the easiest task first before hurdling the big ones.

I highly recommend reading the book by Darren Hardy called the Compound Effect – it’s all about how smaller action steps keep you moving forward and add up into big achievements.

5. Get an Accountability Partner

If you feel you need help/support to keep moving forward, find a friend and ask for their help.

Ask them to support you when achieving your goals is getting tough to remind you of your goals. Maybe ask them to join you on your journey towards a healthy lifestyle.

You can also celebrate your milestones together.

It’s smart to declare your mission out loud. The more people who know about your goals, the more you are likely to stick to your plan.

6. Build the awareness habit.

Self-awareness or being aware of who and what you are is a good tool to facilitate behavioural change. When starting a habit, we have to know our weaknesses and conquer them before they conquer us. This takes a lot of mindfulness, willpower and dedication, but once we become acutely aware of it, we are well on our way to success. It is difficult to admit where we have possibly fallen short of our goals. We end up making up excuses for our behaviours. Get out of your comfort zone, know your weaknesses and your contributions then learn and grow from it. Find time at the end of each day to reflect and meditate on how you can improve yourself.

7. Link new habits with old ones.

Habits that you are already successful at can help you to establish new ones.

When you link new habits to old ones, it is easier to remember the new ones..

An example of this would be drinking water before you sit down to eat a healthy meal. Another example is to meditate daily when you wake up in the morning.

8. Practice the 5-second rule.

Why the 5 second rule? You want to get started right away on a new habit because if you don’t, your primal brain will kick in with all of the reasons why not to do it…procrastination, overthinking, feeling overwhelmed or tired.

A very helpful tool is to set up an urge jar so anytime your brain kick in and you overcome the negative thoughts and do the habit you add a glass bead to an urge jar. You can find out the details why this really works at theLife Coach School Podcast Episode #263 [

9. Commit at least 60 days to building a new habit

When you are building new habits, commit to at least 60 days. Many people believe that it takes 21 to 30 days.

According to habit expert James Clear it takes on average, more than 2 months before a new behavior becomes automatic — 66 days to be exact.

Do not worry if you mess up. His studies also show that missing or skipping a day or two will not affect your habit forming process.

10. Add rewards to the process

Add some fun into building your new habits by rewarding yourself.

Say you are building a healthier eating practice. You can reward yourself with a cheat day where you can eat what you want.

Don’t go crazy with the rewards and resist the normal tendency to be hard on yourself.

11: Use daily reminders to initiate behaviour.

This can be in the form of written goals, a vision board or a friend. There are also apps available to help remind you of your goals and record your achievements.

Create a routine.

on the other hand, is the consistent action you take to create a behavioural change.

Focus on how you feel.

Self awareness is powerful. Take a few moments daily to reflect on what you’ve done and how you feel is a great way to keep in touch with the positive effect living a healthy lifestyle has on you.

Use any or all of these tips to help get you going and keep you on track to a healthy lifestyle.

How to Stay Fit Despite Your Age

May 30, 2019 by Martha Minniti

Exercising will improve your health especially as you age. Not only that it will keep your body in better shape making it easier to get around especially in your 70’s and beyond.

Being consistent and taking the time to exercise pays off by helping you to reduce the risks of having heart diseases, cancers, and diabetes. As you get older, what you are capable of doing changes.

Your age determines the amount and type of exercise you should be doing.

We’ve created this simple guide to help you figure this out:

Childhood and adolescence:

For children, regular amounts of exercise and activity will help build healthy bones, give kids more self-confidence, controls weight, and keeps kids in healthy sleep patterns.

Children should be active for at least an hour per day. This can be hard in the winter months, you’ll have to get creative and find fun ways to engage your child in activity when it isn’t possible to get outside and move.

You want to encourage your child to participate in a variety of sports which can help them develop certain skills. They can also do non-scheduled physical activities, like going to playgrounds.

During adolescence, teenagers may not become as physically active as before, especially for girls. Managing anxiety and stress and having a healthy body image can be achieved by exercising moderately.

To keep teenagers physically active, parents can persuade them to join at least one sport, regardless if it is with a team or not as long as it can help them stay fit.

20s:

People who are in their 20s are usually the most active. At this stage, VO2 max, which measures the rate at which oxygen can be pumped into the muscles, is at its peak and their reaction times are the fastest. However, every year, up to 1% of the VO2 max decreases and one’s reaction time tends to slow down. Here’s the thing, exercising regularly aids in slowing down this decline.

Retaining the optimum VO2 max and reaction in your system can be achieved by increasing your bone density and lean muscle mass.

To keep yourself fit, you can choose various physical activities while having fun. Rowing, boot camp or tag rugby are great examples for this.

If you work out regularly, you can ask a professional to help you establish periodization while you are training. With this, you can divide your activities into different aspects, like volume, intensity and type of exercise. Doing so allows you to boost your performance and prepares you for any exercise events.

30s:

Focusing on your cardiovascular strength and fitness is essential when you are in your 30s. With your career and your family as your priorities, a sedentary lifestyle might not be avoided. Always remember to have a good posture and refrain from sitting for long periods of time. Even while you are at your home, you can always use household chores as reasons for you to move around.

At this stage, HIIT or high-intensity interval training is something you can try. This involves high-intensity activities that are divided into lower intensity exercise periods which would only take 20 minutes for you to finish.

Pelvic floor exercises can be done by women, especially after giving birth. These activities, often called as Kegel exercises help in the prevention of incontinence.

If you want to explore more, you can also try yoga, boot camp, or spin class.

40s:

As people tend to start gaining more weight as they turn 40, resistance exercise is recommended to burn calories and prevent the accumulation of fat. Resistance training for ten weeks can help gain lean weight, increase metabolic rate, and decrease fat weight.

You can go to the nearest gym and follow a weight training program. Instead of walking as an exercise, running would be better. If you want to reduce back pain, build your core strength by doing pilates too.

50s:

At this age, you are at a greater risk of developing chronic conditions like cardiovascular diseases and type 2 diabetes.

Weight-bearing and strength training exercises can help you stay fit and robust. You may also try activities that promote balance and provide relaxation.

60s:

As you get older, you are more prone to various chronic conditions, even cancer. To avoid such, people at this age should engage in a high level of physical activity.

Even if aging declines physical activity, it is your mission to stay fit and active.

Exercises that improve strength and flexibility should be done at least twice a week. You may also engage in various forms of dancing, like ballroom dancing. Aqua aerobics and brisk walking can help you, too.

70s:

As cognitive functioning starts to decline at the age of 70 and above, exercising is very crucial as it improves your brain’s health. Keep yourself mobile, especially if you experienced being ill before.

To keep yourself fit, talking walks with family members and friends when they visit would be a great idea. Cardiovascular, balance, and strength exercises should also be a part of your exercise regime, as of course, with the approval of a professional.

Regardless of what age you are, exercising indeed is beneficial and essential in achieving good health.

5 Ways to Live Longer

May 16, 2019 by Martha Minniti

Despite the fact that the United States has a huge budget allotted on healthcare, it still has low life expectancies among developed nations.

Is it possible that we in the healthcare industry might be mistaken for quite some time now?

Impact of Health Habits on Life Expectancy

To know the impact of health habits on life expectancy, a study using data gathered from the Health Professionals Follow-up Study (HPFS) and Nurses’ Health Study (NHS) was conducted massively by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. This study involved a huge number of people gathered from separate studies. From 1980 to 2014, more than 78,000 women were observed by NHS and above 40,000 men were followed by HPFS since 1986 until 2014.

Through the systematic administration of standardized questionnaires, data on alcohol consumption, physical activity, smoking, body weight, and diet were obtained by researchers from HPFS and NHS.

What does it take to have a healthy lifestyle?

Having a huge impact on the risk of premature deaths, these five things were closely monitored and measured to define the ways to achieve a healthy lifestyle. The following are given below:

Having a balanced diet
Exercising regularly
Maintaining a healthy body weight
Stop smoking.
Drink alcohol moderately.

Is a healthy lifestyle beneficial?

One may not see its value but having healthy habits is very important. People who followed these five ways lived longer than those who haven’t. According to the study, men and women lived 12 years and 14 years longer, respectively, given that they have started practicing these habits when they were 50 years old. Those who haven’t had those habits suffered from cardiovascular disease, cancer, or premature death.

Furthermore, a study was also conducted stating that people who apply even just one of those five habits are expected to extend their life expectancy by two years for both men and women. With this, people who practice more healthy habits tend live longer.

A similar research in 2017 also states that people above 50 who never tried smoking, who moderately drink alcohol and have maintained a normal body weight had an extension of seven years in their life expectancy. Another study in 2012 stated that unhealthy lifestyle habits such as smoking, being obesite, having a poor diet, being inactive, and drinking alcohol excessively contributed to more than half of the premature deaths reported.

So, what now?

The thing is, the U.S. had focused on the development of various drugs and ways to treat diseases, yet they never invest on preventing them instead.

A change in lifestyle and healthy does not occur overnight. Sometimes, it takes a nationwide effort and public health policies to be implemented. While this may be the goal, this can be very challenging. If such habits will be promoted, a lot of companies would shut down such as fast food chains or soda factories.

So the question is… what now?