“I don’t have time”

How often do you find yourself saying that when someone tells you that you need to work out, you need to meal prep or you need to cook for yourself?

Building a healthy lifestyle is often misconstrued as “needs to be a brand new lifestyle.” In reality, it should be looked at more as “how do we adjust our current habits to healthier habits” and “how does this work with my lifestyle?”

Today on the podcast we break down:

• Incorporating healthier eating habits into your current life.
• How movement fits into your life
• Building a routine, one habit at a time.

Start with your goals, then break down the habits associated with them. To learn more about setting big goals AND little goals, go back to Episode 55 where I talked all about how I failed in 2022 and what I learned.

If your healthy lifestyle goals are nutrition based:

Ask yourself:

• Where can you start to make changes in your current situation?
• If it means eating out less, does it mean cooking more? What does your schedule look like?
• What can you prepare on the weekends?

If your goals are movement based:

Ask yourself: What form of movement DO YOU ENJOY? Setting a goal to run every day when you hate running means you won’t have any desire to work toward that goal. Be honest with yourself, what kind of movement do you actually enjoy?

Next, take time to review the barriers you will face, for example, if you’re going out to walk, when are you going, what will the temperature be, etc?

Finally, how doe the movement fit into your schedule? Can you involve the family somehow? Can it be done during sports or activities?

If your goal is to build a new routine… be realistic.

Since morning routines tend to be the biggest one in the health and wellness community, let’s dive into these some more. If your goal is to set up a new morning routine, the first place you need to look at is your sleep. What time are you going to bed the night before, if you are staying up until midnight and wanting to get up at 5:00, that is not enough sleep.

Are you sleeping through the night? If you have a baby and are up 3 times during the night, 5am might not be a realistic time for you.

After you have evaluated your sleep, set your alarm clock for a time you know is reasonable to get up. If you are shifting from getting up at 6:30 to getting up at 4:30… most likely you will see some pushback from your body. Try 30-45 minutes at a time… instead of getting up at 6:30, get up at 5:45. Over time you can push that earlier.

Next, make a list of the habits you want to accomplish and pick ONE or TWO to start with. For example, if you want to: journal, meditate, work out, make the coffee, shower, eat breakfast and pack the kid’s lunches… that’s a lot to accomplish. It will end up creating resistance to the morning.

Start with two instead: for example, make coffee and work out. Once you get into this habit, you can slowly build on more habits for the morning.

When it comes to fitting healthy into your lifestyle, regardless of what your goals are, make sure you are:

• Realistic
• Watching your schedule
• Flexible

There is no such thing as perfect in a healthy lifestyle. The most important part is that you try again the next day.