We all know the importance of maintaining a healthy lifestyle. It goes without saying: living a healthy lifestyle now will help maintain your mind and body when you’re older.
But we understand it’s easier said than done. Planning and making healthy meals as well hitting the gym on a regular basis are no easy feat when you have a busy schedule to begin with. Fortunately, we’ve discovered four healthy lifestyle habits you can adopt to ensure you lead a healthy lifestyle despite a hectic schedule. Read on to learn our tips below!
Meal planning
Given the hectic pace of everyday life, it can hard to meal prep for the week. Between work, exercise and maintaining an active social life, figuring out a healthy meal plan for the week is probably the last thing you want to do after a long day. And when you don’t have the groceries you need to prepare a well-balanced meal, fast food, takeout and frozen meals come into play.
If maintaining a healthy diet is important to you, relying on takeout food for sustenance isn’t the best idea. A person has little control of the ingredients that go into a meal when ordering take out which is why meal delivery services have become a popular alternative for many busy individuals.
Meal delivery companies provide healthy meals for the chunk of the population that considers grocery shopping, meal planning and cooking chores. Vancouver has a slew of healthy meal delivery options available that allow to you pick and choose your daily meals and have it delivered on a weekly basis, at a time that suits you.
From vegan to gluten-free, there’s a food delivery service style for everyone. This way, busy individuals like yourself can get healthy, well rounded meals even if their lifestyle doesn’t allow them time to cook themselves. Talk about efficiency!
Calorie tracker
According to experts, weight loss is 90 percent diet, 10 percent exercise, which is why calorie track apps like My Fitness Pal have become so useful in recent years.
With their handy product databases, they take the guess work out of eating by tracking exactly how many calories, macronutrients and micronutrients you consume in a day. Users simply have to scan their food product on the barcode scanner in their app and watch the nutritional information upload onto their screen.
Other calorie tracker apps like My Net Diary and FatSecret not only track your calories and exercise levels but your overall weight loss progress as well, in addition to providing access to free journals, user messaging boards and daily health tips. These apps are a great way to stay accountable to your healthy lifestyle habits and monitor food consumption on a day to day basis.
Fit Bit
Fitbit is the world’s leading fitness tracker and for good reason. This innovative app allows users to track all-day activity, workouts and sleep all on one easy application. By being able to monitor your eating habits and activity levels throughout the day, it makes it easier maintain a healthy lifestyle even if your schedule doesn’t allow you to keep track yourself. The Fit Bit also lets you:
Record workouts- Track your workouts and see the results of your hard work.
Monitor heart rate- Fit Bit uses Pure Pulse to measure your heart rate and identify trends, manage stress and see the results of your workouts.
See how you sleep- Using the tracker, discover how much time you spend asleep, restless or fully awake.
Manage weight- Connect to the smart scale to monitor BMI, lean mass and body fat percentage.
Accountability buddy
If you’re prone to splurging on treats when you know you shouldn’t, consider enlisting the help of a friend! By relying on each other to keep each other on track, you’re far less likely to give in to bad food habits and skip a gym session. Going grocery shopping together, cook similar meals and working out at the same gym are just a few ways you can use each other’s friendship to monitor and maintain a healthy lifestyle.
No one will hold you more accountable to your eating and workout habits than someone who is doing the same with their life.
Meal planning
“Meal planning is the foundation of a healthy diet. The practice helps you plan out a given set of healthy meals so you’re more likely to put nutrient-dense foods in your body,” says Laura Poland, R.D.N., owner of Dietitian in Your Kitchen. “It’s much less likely you’ll resort to eating out or ordering delivery as a last minute option when life gets busy. Menu planning and then scribbling down a detailed grocery list makes it easier to resist unhealthy impulse buys.”
The first step is setting aside time to plan your meals. The next step is to figuring out how far in advance you’d like to plan out your meals- a week? Two weeks? A month? It all comes down to personal preference and what works best for you. From there, start brainstorming! Some helpful tips to keep in mind when organizing your grocery list:
Download useful cooking apps -Big Oven and Yummly, for example, give you plenty of delicious recipe ideas.
Cook once, eat twice– Consider trying a recipe that will make enough food to last a few meals. Vegetable lasagna or rotisserie chicken are two great examples!
Practice the 90:10 rule– When writing your shopping list, it’s important to keep your ingredient list 90 percent nutrient-dense edibles (lean meats, produce, whole grains, etc) and 10 percent treats (ice cream, candy, etc.). This ensures you stay on track with your healthy eating.
Did we forget some useful tips that you use in your own life? Let us know in the comments below!
Author: Lauren Martineau
