Your Guide to a Healthy, Carefree Vacation
(Health Secrets Newsletter) One can only hope that if you’ve done things correctly, the maintenance part of your new lifestyle should be the easy part. At this point your renovations are complete and you should be a transformed person. Ideally maintenance should mean continuing many of the changes you’ve incorporated into a new lifestyle over the course of your journey. So, what does that new lifestyle look like now? Are you:
- Experiencing life with joy and enthusiasm
- Experiencing inner happiness, peace and contentment with your choices
- Feeling great about your mind, body and soul each and every day
- Feeling confidence and empowerment in your ability to make healthy choices
- Using wellness techniques that promote joyful living
- Equipping yourself with resources that enforce the way to powerful results
- Caring for yourself with love, compassion, and understanding
- Filling the new you with excitement, passion and anticipation for this transformed lifestyle that leaves you feeling revitalized, energetic and hopeful.
If you answered yes to the above, that’s terrific. But what happens if you find yourself so incredibly confident that you start falling into previous habits? What if you find 5 extra pounds creeping back on the scale and you start to wonder what is going wrong? Well, here are a few places you can start looking to get back on track and feeling fabulous again:
- Slip-ups will happen and that is okay. No one has gained 5 pounds from one bad day of eating. Get back on the wagon ASAP! However, taking time to notice how you feel at this time can be a powerful motivational key for getting yourself back on track.
- Have a support network in place and ask for help.
- Continuing your education is key to understanding how to make healthy choices and invest in yourself.
- Exercise is essential to maintaining your health; at least 30-60 minutes every day.
- Find non-food rewards; don’t use food as a reward system. Food is fuel not a reward!
- Care for and about yourself. Think about how much you are worth.
- When you are craving food, look at what’s underneath that craving. Still the craving by responding instead to the feeling beneath the craving.
- Be a food carrier and have a plan “B.
- Don’t ever let yourself get to the point of saying or feeling “I’m starving.”
- ln you thoughts, always come from a place of want rather than should, from a place of love versus discipline and understanding versus judgment.
- Go back to the basics if you begin to get off track:
- Portion control
- Weigh & measure food
- Food quality
- Log your food
- Move your body
- Find motivation where ever you can (books, other people, races, local gyms, podcasts, etc.)
Main Point – You know the keys to maintaining, as you’ve incorporated the necessary habits into your lifestyle to get to this point.
Highlight – Your new lifestyle provides an overall sense of well-being and a high-quality life full of happiness, joy, peace, and empowerment. It is worth the investment of maintaining it. Do you want to go through this journey a second time?
Take Away – The road is not always easy and it never ends – but it is a choice you have made. A healthy mindset and lifestyle is never achieved; it is a process we all strive to perfect day-by-day.
Homework – Decide if you are worth the investment in maintenance. It is an investment in yourself, your family and your future. You are a great role model for others and you will never know how many lives you have impacted with your choices. You are so worth tthis investment!
