With ever new year, it’s time to revisit those ever-popular health resolutions. Whether you vowed to eat a healthier diet, exercise more, take more natural herbal supplements, or get more sleep, you’ve definitely got your work cut out for you. Breaking old bad habits can be tough work, but it is very rewarding if you stick it out! With long term health and wellness in mind, here are 5 easy tips that should help make things a bit easier.
1. Diet The Right Way
Strict weight loss diets may work for certain people, but it can be difficult for the average person to adhere to rigid guidelines, lose the weight, and then keep everything off without falling into old eating habits. A simple plant-based diet, when combined with regular exercise, can help you lose weight, lower your cholesterol and blood pressure, and avoid diseases like diabetes and heart disease.
This means eating more apples, bananas, berries, carrots, leafy greens, beans, lentils, nuts, seeds, quinoa, and whole grains for starters. You can still eat lean meats here and there, but cutting back on your meat intake will push the scales in your favor. There are also plenty of great protein alternatives to chemical-rich fitness store supplements like soy, pea, hemp protein, and others that can provide beneficial protein intake while keeping your diet natural and health-focused. Also, remember to practice portion control and eat 3 meals a day spaced evenly apart. You’ll be surprised how simple scheduling and portioning alone can regulate your metabolism.
2. Get Your Exercise
Exercise works in tandem with a healthy diet to provide all sorts of benefits. Working out regularly helps boost your energy and improves your mood, so you have more willpower to eat a better diet! In fact, stress and depression both affect your health in negative ways, so by keeping these things under control with exercise, benefitting even more from staying active. Exercise also helps control your weight and fights off all sorts of conditions and diseases like high blood pressure, diabetes, cancer, and more.
In addition to all of those positive results, regular cardio or strength training also contributes to deeper and healthier sleep, which provides a whole set of health benefits on its own. 30 minutes a day of exercise is generally recommended, though simply choosing to walk and climb stairs when possible can help quite a bit.
3. Sleep More
We told you this was easy. It’s possible to sleep your way to better health! If you are getting a full 8 hours of healthy sleep, you can expect health benefits such as improved immune function, a healthier metabolism, improved memory and learning, improved mood, and more. Improved sleep also lowers the intensity of food cravings, making it easier to eat well.
4. Supplements
Now more than ever, we know so much about a whole host of powerful herbal supplements that can improve health naturally. There are many types of supplements you can take to complement your diet, help improve your sleep, and improve your workout. All you have to do is take a pill!
For example, Chinese rhubarb and sparganium supplements can help aid digestion, while brown seaweed and turmeric supplements can help you regulate your blood sugar, improving mood and metabolism. Turmeric itself is great for lowering inflammation, improving sleep, and reducing aches and pains, among other things.
Jujube and Chinese salvia are also great for promoting restful sleep. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Asian ginseng, astralagus, and ophiopogon can help pump up your energy levels. Finally, kelp and grape seed extract are widely known as effective weight management supplements. There are many other types of herbal supplements available on the market; you just have to find the supplements that work for you.
5. Treat Your Gut
Today we also know much more about digestive health, and that keeping this part of our health in good working order is key to personal wellbeing. Luckily, this isn’t too difficult. All you have to do is work fermented foods into your daily diet, such as yogurt, sauerkraut, kefir, aged cheese, kimchi, and kombucha. All of these fermented foods contain good bacteria, or probiotics, which live in your stomach and aid in digestion. If you’re not a huge fan of the strong odors, tastes, or dairy content in a lot of these fermented foods, you can also take probiotic supplements.
With a healthy balance of good gut bacteria in your stomach’s ecosystem, you can benefit from reduced body inflammation, improved digestion, diabetes resistance, improved weight management, and many other amazing health benefits.
Get To It
As you can see, all of these 5 tips work together. It may seem pretty intimidating to give your exercise and diet habits a complete overhaul, but if you do a couple of small and easy things first, you might find that bigger changes come easier. For instance, if you eat more vegetables, start taking some supplements, engage in light exercise, take probiotics, and get more sleep, you can start to see small improvements that will start snowballing into huge changes. It is a new year after all, you owe it to yourself.
