Healthy Lifestyle

What is a healthy lifestyle?

A healthy lifestyle means:

• Eating healthy foods. This includes fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. If you eat meat and dairy foods, choose lean meats and low-fat dairy foods most of the time. Healthy eating also means not eating too much sugar, fat, or fast foods. You can still have dessert and treats now and then. The goal is moderation.
• Making some kind of physical activity part of your daily routine. "Physical activity" doesn't have to mean regular visits to the gym or running marathons. There are lots of other ways to fit activity into your life.
• Not smoking: Weight gain is a big concern for many people who want to quit smoking. But many people don't gain weight. And it's more of a health risk to keep smoking than it is to gain a few extra pounds when you quit.
• Drinking only moderate amounts of alcohol: That's up to 2 drinks a day for men, 1 drink a day for women(I do 2shots tho).
• Managing stress: Many people find that eating is their way of managing stress. If you have a lot of stress in your life, it can be hard to focus on making healthy changes to your lifestyle..

Becoming more active and improving your eating habits are the two main ways to reach a healthy weight.

First, change your thinking

If you need to make some lifestyle changes to get to a healthy weight, you'll have more success if you first change the way you think about certain things:

• Don't compare yourself to others. Healthy bodies come in all shapes and sizes. Our culture focuses much too much on thinness, and thinness is just not realistic or natural for most of us. Yet we feel bad when we can't achieve such an unrealistic body size. Body size isn't as important as being healthy.
• Pay attention to how hungry or how full you feel. When you eat, pay attention to why you're eating and how much you're eating.
• Decide that you're going to improve your health: For example, you may want to:
• Become more fit.
• Lower your blood pressure.
• Lower your blood sugar (if you have diabetes or prediabetes).
• Lower your cholesterol.
• Raise your HDL (good cholesterol).

Second, Keep track of your weight

• Weigh yourself no more than once a week, unless your doctor tells to you to do so more often because of a health problem.
• Try to weigh yourself on the same scale, at the same time of day, in about the same amount of clothing.
• Remember that many things can affect your weight. It's normal for your weight to go up and down by a few pounds from one day to the next. Try to look at the general trend of your weight, rather than the day-to-day changes.
• Aim to lose no more than 1 to 2 pounds a week. Weight loss of more than that often means that you are not getting enough nutrients to be healthy. And some of the weight you lose may be from lean body tissue (muscle and organ tissue) or water loss, not fat.