I guess some of us ask ourselves the above question sometimes, yea it can be frustrating I know. Everyone talking healthy living, its almost over rated right? I would try my best to make you understand it from what I have learnt over the few years I have lived on earth,lolzzz.
When we hear the word living healthy, a lot of things come to our minds, most people think it means dieting; meaning eating vegetables and fruits only or watching your calorie or carbs(carbohydrate) consumption, some think its not taking processed food at all, some think its exercising and eradicating processed food from their diet, some think its exercising alone and some think its eating a low calorie, low carbs, low cholesterol, less processed food diet and also working out/exercising.
Well whatever you think living healthy means just know one thing,that its not all about one particular system or area but its all the areas of the above illustration and a mind body affair. Specifying on one type of food isn’t living healthy rather concentrating on having a balanced all round natural food and reducing the amount of processed food or making sure your processed food is organic if you can and then working out/exercising with the re-invention of your mindset, is what we can call a healthy lifestyle.
I am personally what you can call a rugged work out person, because i work out hard. I try everything but i don't push myself because i believe in doing exercise in comfort not in pain or struggle or shortness of breath. I take my time to build my stamina and that's why enjoy it and before you know it i become good at a particular routine. Yea...i don't know how i got to his point but when i started i just started with jogging every weekend on the streets and before I knew it, I was in love with exercises.
I created my own routines in doors that I do almost everyday and then use weekends to jog around the streets. Maybe it was just my love for sports right from child hood I cant tell but on some days I would decide to do a morning and night routine, yea...that's how I loved work outs, this was personal and not imitated or for the reasons why so many people do it. You would get to understand better as you read on.
Why I brought up my love for exercise story was to say this; from November 2017 till the first week of April 2018 I hadn't worked out at all, not even simple squats, nothing. There was no core reason, I just had a mind break and it affected my love for exercising, I just stopped and didn't even think work outs till the first week of April 2018, I resumed with jogging again. Now that didn't mean I haven't been doing the other healthy living routines but the only exemption was exercises which is good but isn't the definition of living healthy. If you base your definition on healthy living on one thing like i said earlier, you would get it totally wrong.
Now most people are changing their diets and doing exercises to mainly loose weight, gain muscles, be slim and slender etc. Yeah that’s good for sure, but I believe we should change our diets, make our foods mostly low in calories and cholesterol and exercise regularly not for the weight but to keep our immune system in check, to try our little *HUMAN* capacity to prevent sicknesses caused by some foods, to be strong and build a good stamina.
If you start a healthy lifestyle with the wrong aim and mindset, you wouldn’t achieve the benefits all round, you may achieve it bodily but not in the mind which is the most important, and this would make you to always struggle with it rather than enjoying it and living it with ease.
Living healthy is not just about the body, its mind and body. YOU HAVE TO THINK HEALTHY TO BE HEALTHY… You have to change your mindset and everything about you first before you can actually add the food and exercise to it. You have to be ready to change from a particular lifestyle that you thought was sweet and enjoyable to the one that you would discover is sweeter and more enjoyable, you have to see it that way. You have to start to see healthy leaving as mainly a life style, for good sound mind and to have wellness of mind before you can truly commit to a healthy life style and not go off and on.
Working out or exercising isn’t all about weight contrary to believes its for the total wellness of the body and mind. Regular work outs helps you burn out toxins that are harmful to your body, they help you build stamina and strength, then in bonus burn out fats, calories and bad cholesterol to make you fit. Don’t get me wrong, its good to be fit and look toned but most people enter work outs for just that sole reason, when there are several other benefits derived from it.
You don’t have to be fat or have time or to be young before you cultivate the habit of exercising. No matter how little lets cultivate the habit of having our own routines in our bedrooms or jog round our compounds early in the morning before the day gets busy. There’s no excuse for not exercising, because every class, grade and busy type of persons have cultivated a way to go about it, that in spite of everything they still exercise because of how important they know it is.
When I started to change my lifestyle or started to know more about a healthy life style, I was as young as 16years, you can imagine? One may wonder what would make a 16year old young girl watch her diet and get into exercising. I was raised with eating everything not controlling it, reducing or watching it and top of it all I was an only child at that time, so I was really pampered *wink*.
Ahhh...we ate it as long as it was good food, my parents were the best in care and love, I love and appreciate them for that. But then (not now) we were ignorant to believe that not every product or food that people or labels say is good and healthy is actually healthy. I was also always athletic, I loved sports and jogging, same applied to my parents but it wasn’t a lifestyle.
At the time I started to think or consider changing my life style at 16 years, truthfully I wasn’t looking at my weight or conscious of it. Most people thought I was, even my parents because I was tall an huge with a little body which I knew and was told I had. I wasn’t what you call a slim girl but I wasn’t really taking note at that time to make it a reason to change my lifestyle gradually naa…this was the total truth. I also used to have this loss of appetite issue at that time and even till now sometimes which also compounded the issue of everyone thinking I was dieting to lose weight but that wasn’t it. I would tell you the truth that instigated my change at that young age.
I was concerned for my life, hahahaa… funny right. I would explain by telling you a summarized story. About the age of 16 I had finished my secondary school and was trying to secure an admission into the University. There was a family that my parents always took me to spend few of my school holidays as an only child then in primary school so that I wouldn’t feel lonely and alone. My parents had trusted family friends but one of those homes was like my second family because they were the ones my parents trusted so much with me because they were not only strong Christian disciplinarians, they were also elderly and they had also groomed my parents while they were both single.
All their kids where very much senior to me at that time because I was only in primary school, but they were like my elder sisters, I learnt a lot of things as a child from that family that has built some part of me, they are very dear to my heart till date. But back to my point, when I was trying to secure an admission to the university after my WAEC and NECO, I went to spend a little 2 weeks break with them and I was welcomed to a different food lifestyle. Their lifestyle had to change because their dad had been diagnosed with cancer and God gave the mum of the house an inspiration saying if food can cause sicknesses like cancer, then it can heal sicknesses too and with prayers and the help of God she entered a life of research and prevented her husband from taking the chemotherapy sessions by bringing him home.
Long story short she entered a life of food healing and the whole family took into the life style. Everything processed, oily, carcinogenic, fat, milk and sugar were eradicated from the house that period because research showed that they tend to grow and produce cancer cells. So when I came at that time, I met that lifestyle even after Uncle had been diagnosed cancer free, due to the change of life style with plants and food healing, they still continued that way. So what I was used to eating wasn’t there.
It wasn’t easy at first but I didn’t feel bad, I was ready to learn and I had always known that a lot of the foods I eat are not too good for my health, but I eat them because they taste nice. So we don’t moderate and take precaution we just eat all and say God is in control, but something in us tells us we are not living right, we don’t even work out or exercise.
I got to learn a lot about foods, their benefits and disadvantages, foods that are processed with unhealthy ingredients and how they should be removed from our diets. I got to learn the different types of natural fruit juices and vegetables, what each combination for juice or smoothie is used for whether you are sick or not, what they help with in building our immune systems. Because it was always been blended for the man of the house every morning and evening and we all partook in it.
I got to find out that exercises are not just for losing weight but mainly to burn oxygen that eradicate bad toxins out of our systems, especially during jogging and fast walking. When I left there I became an advocate for healthy living, I became scared of processed foods, I started reading labels a lot to check for ingredients that I had learnt are harmful for the body system. I started scrutinizing every consumable processed food I loved to eat, I started to learn to jog. I went home and changed my style of cooking little by little and started to educate my mum on certain ingredients to not put in her food when cooking and why, and why my dad should stop buying some kind of groceries. They listened at first but kind of got fed up because I was over doing it and yes I was, they believed in moderation but I didn’t.
I was doing it for the right reasons but through the wrong way and that was FEAR. I was scared of having any terminal disease when I get old or as a young girl, which was good but wrongly approached.
That began the journey of my healthy lifestyle, some things I started then I still observe till now but some I have niche and cultivated the right way to handle them, through research and a whole lot of other things I have come a long way from when I started and with a better mindset.
So you see my start, though for a good purpose but with a wrong mindset and as I grew older I started to refrain my mindset and before you knew it, it became a life style for me and not a struggle or for fear but for a better and more profitable lifestyle.
I used to also be a Junky ie a junk food lover or I think I still am but this time I channel my love for junks into creating the kind of junks that we can call healthy, by using the right ingredients and follow a low calorie and cholesterol style. So that when I decide to junk I can junk properly and even though I go the other way junking, I have disciplined myself to the point that as much as I like them I can indulge once in a while and can control what goes into my system not because of maintaining my weight which came as a bonus to me, but for the fact that most of the ingredients and system used to process these foods or even to prepare certain foods are not safe for the body system, they are high in toxic substances and carcinogens that are harmful to the body so I have to be careful.
So like I said earlier think of a healthy life style as not just for your body but also your mind,
You need to have a positive mindset before you get into a healthy life style, so that it can become a life style and not a struggle.
See it as the best possible lifestyle anyone could have and it doesn’t cost you anything but changing your mindset and living it.
Courtey: LydiasCheeryMoments
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