The car needs and oil change, parent-teacher conferences are tonight, you need to finish a presentation for work, plan dinner, pick up groceries,… Does this sound like your day? Yeah, I’ve been there too. We all need some easy, healthy hacks to help us out.
Who has time to focus on a healthy lifestyle when you have a schedule that looks like that?
It’s challenging to hold it all together with this mania we all live in right now. Life is busy, so how can you add focus to you and your body to stay healthy?
One of the best ways I have found to live a healthy lifestyle is to be very conscious of my routines. It’s hard to do that day after day with busy schedules, but I found an easy, no-excuse way to get on track and create focus on Me.
I may think I have everything in control but when I actually track these three little things, I find I always lose weight, sleep better, and have more energy. They are wine, water, and walking, the three “W’s”.
Water - Let's Start With The Easy One
Everybody knows you’re supposed to drink eight glasses of water a day.
We all know this but we don’t all do it. I find the easiest way to get enough hydration in my body is to refill two 32-ounce bottles of water and put them on my countertop first thing in the morning. If it is sitting in front of me, ready to go, there’s a good chance I’ll drink it.
Photo by Engin Akyurt
If I’m going to have a sedentary day, I bring one bottle to my desk and sip on it continually throughout the day.
By having a bottle of water sitting out on the countertop reminds me that as I go about my day, whether I’m doing laundry or writing a grocery list, or maybe even just sitting and watching television, I see that bottle of water and I know I have to drink it.
Now if you’re like me & think that water is just too boring and you need flavor with it, well that’s fine as you’re starting this technique.
I’m a big advocate of continuing on your process and slowly eliminating until you’re down to the point you want to be.
If you feel you need to drink flavored water to get it into your system, then do that. But know that flavored waters have all sorts of chemicals in them. Even the ones that say “naturally flavored” have chemicals, which defeats the purpose of drinking water.
It’s important to drink the cleanest form of water you can find.
The best way to do that is to have your flavored water for one bottle and have plain water for the rest and alternate. Then start diluting your flavored water with pure water so it becomes less and less sugary and flavorful, and pretty soon you will find that unflavored water is just fine.
The 2nd W - Walking
The second element is walking.
I have another blog post on getting in your steps everyday and I highly recommend that you set your goal to a minimum of 7,500 steps a day and your goal to be 10,000 steps.
Park your car far away from the store as you’re going into and get those extra steps. Walk if you can instead of driving. Make sure you get your steps in every single day.
Image by Silviu
If you find that by tracking your steps, you’re only averaging 5,000 steps a day, you are probably not walking enough.
If you are physically able to, get in the habit of walking around the block once a day just to get those extra steps in. You can listen to music if you find that relaxing, or you can take that time to just quietly think through things you need to do and to calm your mind and gently meditate as you walk.
Clear your head and getting steps are amazing sources of a healthy lifestyle.
The Final and Hardest "W"
The final, and sometimes hardest “W”, to attend to is wine.
We all love wine, don’t we? With this I’m using the blanket term of “wine” to mean any sort of alcohol whether it’s beer, cocktails, margaritas, whatever – alcohol in general needs focus to live a healthy lifestyle. For this reason, I don’t allow myself alcohol unless I have had a day of 10,000 steps.
Image by Steve Buissinne pixabay
Now if I’m hitting 10,000 steps every day, does that mean I get wine every day? No it does not.
I once had a doctor who was telling me that the entire population of women in the United States drinks way too much alcohol. You really should only be ingesting 4 ounces twice a week, measured.
And it was the term measured that really struck me.
A four-ounce glass of wine is pretty small. Most of us enjoy a nine-ounce glass of wine and we refill it a few times at one sitting. That’s a lot of wine when you consider 8 ounces in a week is all that our bodies should be taking in!
Removing alcohol excess from your diet is a huge step forward in a healthy lifestyle.
I don’t remove it altogether because I quite enjoy wine, but I definitely, consciously, calculate how much alcohol I take in.
If you enjoy sweet wines, Moscato is a very nice white wine that is sweet and refreshing and typically only has 5% alcohol as opposed to 12-15% of other wines. Which means you can technically have a little bit more and still be in the “safe zone” of alcohol for women.
The Final Word On These Healthy Hacks
If you do all three of these things with intention, you will see a marked improvement in your body and your lifestyle. I started paying attention to these things a few years ago and when used in harmony, I suddenly began sleeping, better my clothes began fitting better, and I felt better day in and day out.
I had more patience, I felt calmer, and my blood pressure lowered instantly. There was no drawback.
So I encourage you to find a way to incorporate the three W’s into your healthy lifestyle. Enjoy a glass of wine if you’d like or take a day off from walking every now and again. That never hurts us, when done in moderation.
