Many women struggle with incorporating health and fitness into their everyday lives. While it may look easy to the countless fitness models online, it’s actually proven to be extremely difficult to turn into a lifestyle. I’m sure countless women, myself included, have tried to take up exercising, and after a bit of successful workouts experience the motivation begins to fade out. Either people get discouraged by not seeing results right away, they get distracted by other aspects of their lives or they simply just start too much too fast.
One of the major aspects of a healthy lifestyle is diet. Considering the body gets its energy from food consumption, it’s important to know what foods are best for your body. Some foods we eat get immediately broken down and converted into usable energy, giving us the necessary power to carry out day to day activities. However, the rest of the food gets stored as fat for later use. Our body stores fat because of evolution, as long ago our primitive ancestors didn’t have a steady source of food like the majority of us do today, so it was essential to survival to eat as much as possible when food was. This way, if there was no food source on day the body could rely on the stored-up consumption to survive. Except we think about today’s food culture, considering many of us have a steady eating routine it isn’t necessary to store as much fat as possible. Eating healthy foods like proteins, good fats, and carbohydrates while minimizing foods that are high in saturated fats will help your body maintain good health.
Even though exercising may seem like less of a priority in everyday life, it is another major aspect of health that is important. While it’s important to have fat, too much can make people susceptible to obesity-related disease, like heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes, even for people who aren’t clinically obese. Daily physical activity has been known to have a number of positive health related effects, like reducing the risk of cardiovascular diseases, boosting energy levels and even improving mental health.
Overall, all the changes in diet and exercise won’t help long term unless you stay consistent. Therefore, if you want to see long-term results, the key is to stay consistent. While the process will be up-and-down, it is important to keep the consistency if you want to see those long-term positive outcomes, whether it’s with physical appearance, mental health or overall health. Self-compassion is said to boost the likelihood of seeing difficult tasks through, so any slip up shouldn’t be taken to hard. The important thing is to have a positive attitude and ignore any high expectations.