Beautiful Me…beautiful You…in No Time At All
Imagine this scenario: a healthier you, a trimmer body, and a longer life; all without investing much time at all. Sound crazy? It’s all too possible with just a few tiny behavior changes. But first, you absolutely must truly decide to reshape your body. If you decide that yourself, and this article can give you some help as to how to get there. The secret is to form good habits to replace your bad ones.
So many people just sit and eat without thinking about it at all when they are lonely or bored. When you eat for entertainment, you eat things you body doesn’t need, and sometimes in dangerous amounts . Eating when you are bored or lonely also trains your body to think it is hungry when you’re really just bored. If you sit around and eat, all you do is store fat from the foods that you eat, a big cause of obesity. These signs and others, such as Diabetes, heart conditions, cholesterol problems, and breathing problems are distress signals from your body that indicate that it is high time you made a change in your life.
Lets get started with an important part of a healthier YOU. The BRAIN! Yes the brain. In order to become healthier, you have to overcome the obstacle that you see before you, and that is the rather large entity that has grown over the years. In becoming a different person you need to develop healthy thinking on top of your new habits. You need to keep up your self esteem, for a healthy self esteem will keep that inner self burning to reach your ultimate goal. You need to give yourself a pat on the back and good comments on a job well done. Treat yourself to a new pair of pants or a new top when you have reached a goal. Healthy living has its benefits in the end to extending your life!
The first change you need to make to find a healthier you is to reduce your consumption of high calorie food, and replace them low-calorie, nutrient dense foods. If you were going to have a cheeseburger and fries, you can skip the fries and have a garden salad with low-calorie dressing instead. If you like chicken nuggets with creamy pasta, try having chicken breast with vegetables and a high-fiber bread, or replace that creamy pasta with a low-fat marinara sauce. Instead of take out pizza, try some oven baked fish with rice and a small salad instead.
Somehow, you have to train yourself to exercise when you are bored, instead of eating. Give sports a shot. You need to go outside and get some fresh air; plan some physical activity with your best buds instead of sitting in front of the television or computer. If you’re stuck inside, get a stationary bike and pedal like crazy while you watch your favorite shows. You can even try to explore your local mall, or if nothing else pace around the house; any kind of moving around is way better than sitting.
Write down everything you eat so you are sure of what’s going in. Lots of people gain weight by noshing in front of the television with a big bucket of chicken. Portion your food and write it down. Because it’s a lot easier to keep track of how many calories you are taking in if your food is portioned. It’s time to get out of denial about how much food you really eat. Lots of overweight people claim they don’t really eat much food, but sometimes they eat a lot without knowing it.
Another good item to document is your activities. Keep a log of your activities that you work at daily or weekly. You can go online and access different websites that will tell you the approximate amount of calories that you burn during an activity. One such website is http://www.nutristrategy.com/activitylist4.htm. You can also find other websites to your liking as well.
One of the most important things to remember is not to fear failure; in fact, expect to fail multiple times before you reach your goal. Remember that those failures are small battles in an overall war for your health. Remember that you must stay the course to win the war. Everyone is going to have their bad days. If your boss yells at you, and you get sad and sit in front of the television and eat too much pizza or an entire tub of ice cream, this is no reason to give up or beat yourself up about it. If you slip, it’s just a sign that you haven’t reached your goal yet, and you need to pick yourself up and get back on track instead of falling back into the pattern.