Brushing our teeth is a habit most of us cultivated when we were little and is one we live with for life. Fitness or health isn’t different. If we aspire to stay fit and healthy in the long term, we need to habitually do things that promote health and fitness. Here are 3 habits that will keep you fit and healthy over the years.
1. Move every day
Simply carve out some time for movement every day. This might be 60 minutes or just 20 and you might do something very intense or light, but make a habit out of moving daily.
Most of us workout or play or do something intense 2 to 4 times a week and that’s about it for movement. This means that we do absolutely nothing active on 3 to 5 days of the week, barring the occasional walk to the kitchen or restroom. This is concerning because the human body is designed to move and without movement it will not be able to thrive.
So, irrespective of whether it is your workout day or not, move. Set aside time every day for movement. Some days this time will be used to work out and on other days you’ll use this time to do some form of movement, be it walking, stretching, breathing, swimming or whatever else you like to and can do. Make movement a habit.
2. Say no to sugar after meals
You know that craving to eat something sweet after every meal? That’s not physiological need. It is simply a habit that we have developed over time. And now, we look to finishing each meal with a mouthful of something sweet, if not a full plate of dessert.
This is a habit we need to break and, like most habits, the only way to do that is by replacing this with something else. Stated differently, sweet has become our finisher for every meal. To fix that we need to replace that with something less harmful and more useful.
Fruit is a simple option and one that most of us have tried. While it is still sweet, it is low in calories and isn’t indulgent enough to keep you coming back for more, compared to a cookie or ice cream. But it needn’t be just fruit. Your ‘finisher’ can be anything as long as it keeps you away from sugar. Cheese, curd, nuts, milk or even water can be used as finishers. Just do it consistently for a few weeks and you’ll see that you’ll search the cabinet for this, instead of something sweet.
3. Stop when you’re satisfied
Habits are about feelings. When doing any activity our brains make us feel a certain way and it is that feeling that we go back for. Eating sugar, smoking cigarettes, exercising, listening to music and even helping people, results in a type of feeling which we want to go back to. Once we get used to this feeling, and we start liking it, we do things to experience that again. Overeating is one such feeling.
Eating was, is and always will be fun. And when food is available in abundance, when we stop eating is a conscious decision we need to make. We typically eat until we’re full. In fact, we have been taught to ‘eat well’ and that, in most Indian households at least, means to eat a lot. This advice of eating a lot comes from a time when food and nutrients weren’t abundant and activity was not a concern. That time is long gone. Today, if we want to stay fit and healthy, we need to eat just enough and not more. And the only way to do that is to consciously stop eating when we are satisfied, but not full. Yes, it sounds vague and yes, there is no certain way of saying when you’ve eating just enough. But practise listening to your body and you’ll figure it out very quickly. Once you do, you will enjoy the feeling of satiation combined with lightness, which you will want to come back to. And once you are there, it becomes a habit to stop eating before you’re full which will help you consume enough nutrients without adding more bodyweight.
