Preparing your MIND for a Healthy Lifestyle is an important aspect to beginning, recommitting, or continuing your healthy lifestyle!
Congratulations! You’ve taken a wonderful first step toward a healthy lifestyle: You have DECIDED or recommitted to live healthier!
Success is something you decide ahead of time.
But let’s face it. We’ve all been here before. We decide to make changes, eat better, get to the gym, and something happens. We get sick, or our day gets so busy we miss our workout, or a meeting gets scheduled during lunch and all of a sudden we’re starving and the only option is the vending machine or fast food restaurant on the corner. And just like that, our healthy lifestyle is derailed. Again.
As a health and wellness coach, I speak with people all the time just like you and me, who have good intentions, but somehow either sabotage themselves or get sidetracked as life – and the people in it – have a different agenda.
When we embark on a healthy lifestyle, sometimes we skip the most important step: preparing our mind. Think of our mind as another muscle that we train.
The body achieves what the mind believes.
Our thoughts, actions, beliefs, and results are all intertwined around a healthy mindset. Here are some of my top tips for preparing your mind for a healthy lifestyle.
Define Healthy
Healthy can mean different things to different people. It’s important to know what healthy means to you personally. Not what other people, magazines or society says is healthy. What do YOU want as part of a healthy lifestyle? Here are a few ideas:
- Weight loss or gain (yes, some people struggle to put on or maintain healthy weight)
- Strength
- Flexibility
- Increased energy
- Better digestion
- Improved performance as an athlete, musician, or life in general
- Relationships – with God, yourself, your children, partner, friends, family…
- Financial fitness
Whatever healthy means to you, be sure to write down your own personal definition. Include your health goals and dreams.
Start with Why
When I met my best friend and now husband, we made a promise to each other: to be as healthy as we possibly could be, every single day, for the rest of our lives.
That is my “why.” That is what motivates me to live a healthy lifestyle.
What about you? What is your reason for living a healthy lifestyle? How do you want to feel? Who in your life is counting on you to be healthy? What family or personal history are you looking to change? Maybe you want to compete, in your first 5k, marathon, or fitness competition. Or maybe you simply want to ROCK any outfit you put on!
Whatever your reason, OWN it!
Embrace your WHY.
