Taking positive steps towards improving your health is always a good thing, whether monumental efforts or small changes. Changing your diet, having a more active lifestyle, and cooking nutritious meals for the family takes you one step closer to a lifetime of health.
In order for these efforts to be truly effective and life-changing they have to become habits.
Want to know which habits are required to keep the excess pounds away?
We’ve kept it simple and easy-to-follow with this list of six:
1. Drink water – drink healthy.
If you find yourself drinking at least eight to ten glasses of water per day, then you are on the right track to losing weight and keeping it off. Being properly hydrated throughout the day keeps your energy up and also helps curb your appetite for processed foods.
You can also change things up by going with healthier liquid choices – water with lemon or lime slices are delicious and refreshing. Smoothies hydrate and give you added nutrition. Going out for liquid energy with your friends? Green tea is the best choice.
Proper hydration is key to ensuring that your healthy food choices do not go to waste by drinking fizzy soda and other sugary drinks.
2. Make eating a scheduled habit.
When you’re just starting with your weight loss efforts, one of the biggest adjustments you have to make is with how many meals you eat and how often you eat them.
Yes, you got that right – weight loss and keeping it off requires NOT skipping meals.
Our bodies digestive process works in such a way that about every 2-3 hours, we experience ‘hunger signals’.
It is necessary to continuously fuel the body for the activities to get through your day with steady energy levels.
In order for you to effectively lose weight with Clean Eating and exercise, you have to make sure your body has what it requires. You have to eat small, frequent, nutrient-packed clean meals.
This allows you to recover lost energy, and prevents you from binge eating to quell your built-up appetite. Your cortisol levels will remain low, and your body does not need to go on ‘survival mode’, where your brain signals your body to store fat in the abdomen.
3. Establish a good routine.
One of the most essential habits to lose weight and maintain a healthy body, is to make sure that your daily routines coincide with your health goals.
What you do repeatedly determines the type of results you will have.
For example, make sure that eating a clean and delicious breakfast is part of your morning schedule. This is where food preps prove helpful – you don’t have to stress about what to have for breakfast, or what food to take for work.
Make meal prepping a part of your weekly routine too – schedule it on your most ‘relaxed’ days, so you can actually enjoy doing it. Allot about three hours when you’re just starting out.
How do you not get overwhelmed with all the changes you have to make?
Start with what you can manage.
If you’re super busy, you can begin food prepping for just 2-3 days at a time – or just prep breakfasts instead of three full meals.
It takes about 21 days for any ‘routine’ to become a habit you naturally fall into, so stay determined and stick to it.
4. Make every step a positive experience.
Weight loss can be fun – it can be exciting, it can definitely be something to look forward to every day. If you want to truly be able to lose the extra weight, and successfully keep it off, you have to exert extra effort to change your perspective about what you’re doing.
Shifting to a Clean eating Routine does not have to mean saying goodbye to your favorites. You can look at it as eating more whole foods, and letting go of things that have a long-term negative effect on your body.
Clean Eating can also be a daily adventure – it can be about discovering new clean recipes that you can put together to get some variety into your weekly menu. It’s about exploring more mouth-watering ways to transform your favorite fresh ingredients into delicious meals.
Exercising does not have to mean setting aside your precious time to work out – it’s really more of investing your time to improving your overall health and quality of life. It can be about meeting new people and expanding your physical limits too!
This kind of mindset motivates you to continue with renewed enthusiasm everyday. The result? Getting to your target weight and maintaining it becomes almost effortless.
5. Enabling yourself to avoid temptation.
Maintaining a healthy weight is a lot about empowering yourself to avoid the ever-present temptation of processed food and the couch potato lifestyle.
First, you ease into things. Make it a step by step process.
For example, from today moving forward, no soy sauce and ketchup – the day after next, you move on to removing white bread. The gradual removal of processed food items lets you appreciate the transition more, and you get to discover the wide variety of alternatives available to you.
Then once you have removed those processed items from your diet, eliminate temptations from sight, easy reach, and awareness. In short, make sure none is to be found in your home. You cannot consume what you don’t have.
If you love snacking, especially when you feel your energy waning, be ready by having some clean snacks in your bag or office drawers. Make them nutrient-packed and delicious so you’re never tempted to reach for a bag of chips or to order a fast-food burger.
Some say it can be a ‘battle’ – so arm yourself by preparing for it. Don’t let temptation win!
“First we form habits, then they form us. Conquer your bad habits or they will conquer you.” – Rob Gilbert, author
6. Find someone else to hold you accountable.
Let’s face it, we never want to tell someone else we went against our own goals.
Having someone else to report to, is the #1 way to insure that you stick with your plan.
By having a supportive accountability partner, you will receive encouragement no matter how you perform. Having discussions with someone with similar goals will most likely inspire and stimulate you to move forward.
BUT
Where do you find an accountability partner?
How do you create a routine?
How do you even know what to eat and when?
That’s where our 30 Day Clean Eating Challenge comes into play!
Thousands of people have gone through this program, and every day I see a new success story come in.
Here’s a few of the benefits our challenge members have experienced:
- Weight Loss,
- Inches off their waist line,
- Doctors taking them off of medicines,
- Improvement in the quality of their life,
- Increased Happiness,
- Family members wanting to start Eating Clean too
- and so much more!
What experience will you have when you take the 30 Day Clean Eating Challenge?!
Let your weight loss habits form your healthy lifestyle, be on your way to keeping it off, and get ready to enjoy a life filled with love and vitality!
What are YOUR weight loss habits?
Share it with us in the comments section below!
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