Ok, who has stuck by their New Year’s Resolutions so far? You still have time to pick up a pencil and paper and make a list of goals that are closer to your reality. Something magical happens when your wishes and desires are captured on paper.
Surely for many of us, one of those purposes; especially after the excesses of the holidays; is to resume or acquire healthy habits, lose weight after a pregnancy, have a better body shape, more energy, enjoy more vitality and health etc…DO YOU THINK ITS POSSIBLE ? Or are you one of those people who start a different diet every Monday? Have you asked yourself why?
What happens many times is that we don’t focus well on our objectives, translating into little or immaterial changes over time. With the era of fitness and the power of social networks, we are saturated with information about those foods that we should or should not consume.
Likewise, our eyes can’t escape the perfect bodies posted online, so it is easy to fall into that dangerous game and pretend to follow a standard of perfect beauty that does not exist in reality.
Therefore, the FIRST step to make substantial change in your life is to recognize yourself as a unique being and give yourself the gift of not comparing yourself with others.
When we start from there, we begin to understand that we can not follow a “perfect” diet, because there is no theory that suits everyone, so that the SECOND exercise we must do is to analyze our own lifestyle:
- Relationships
- Physical activity
- Food at home
- Spirituality
- Education
- Health
- Harmony
- Fun
- Social life
- Finance
- Professional career or job satisfaction
These aspects are what we call primary foods, we can not make changes in our habits, nor get to have a healthy life if we do not analyze where we stand on the above. The first food that we must take care of is that which nourishes the soul, it is the balance that our body requires so that everything works better and so that any eating plan that we carry results in positive results in our physical appearance. It is essential that we put a level of satisfaction to these aspects and analyze which are the areas in which we must set goals and work.
The THIRD exercise that we must do is make a list of the habits that we know, harm our health and our weight or ideal silhouette, an example of them:
- Sugar
- Processed foods
- The excessive consumption of carbohydrates
- Alcohol and / or cigarette
- Sedentary
- Bad sleep habits
The next thing to ask yourself is what you are willing to do to change If in your case you have an irresistible craving for sugar, you could start by not including desserts, cookies, sugary drinks in the supermarket list, not adding sugar to food but consume those that come naturally in fruits, honey etc…
It’s important to analyze what is behind these cravings, in what moments of the day they happen, and what events trigger them. A craving can be the result of a repressed emotion or the way of distracting your attention from a situation that affects you.
If instead you can not be consistent in the gym, think of a physical activity that can satisfy you and that can fit your interests or hobbies, enroll in dance classes, go for a walk in the morning before work, among others .
Lastly, we should understand that it is not about following a diet, which almost always represses us, frustrates us and we do not usually enjoy it, it is about adopting a lifestyle through a change of MENTALITY.
For this, it is necessary to raise our consciousness; understand that we are part of a whole, that beyond an ideal body, it is about cultivating a healthy mind, making use of our emotional intelligence, enriching our spirit, loving who we are, and working to improve our best version of ourselves inside and out.
Maria writes for BebesyMadres.com, a site catered to Latina mothers around the world. She can be reached at maria@bebesymadres.com or on Facebook.
