Why not do things differently this year? A habit takes a good 30 days to change, so trying to achieve more than one small change at a time can be a mighty difficult thing. How about setting yourself 12 new health-enhancing habits for 2013 – one for each month?
What exactly should those new habits be? Well, a lot will be dependent on your long term goals (i.e. losing 10kg, improving your health, reducing your stress load etc.). Consider these goals and work backwards from there, giving thought to the changes required to help you achieve them.
I’m going to suggest 12 very basic but important life and health-enhancing changes, but you could come up with your own or apply them in a different order…
- Month one: Drink enough good quality water. Your weight in kg X 0.033 = your ideal daily water intake (not taking into account any sweat-inducing activities), e.g. 0.033 X 60kg = 1.98L.
- Month two: Eat enough good quality salt. Your daily water intake amount X 2.2 = your daily salt intake, e.g. 1.98L X 2.2 = 4.35ml salt (just short of one teaspoon daily). Good quality salt would be Himalayan Crystal Salt (preferably the Universal Vision brand).
- Month three: Add more fat to your diet, such as coconut fat, butter and cold-pressed nut oils. They ensure better blood sugar control, improved inter-cellular communication, provide the body with long-term energy and help tremendously with weight management. They will also rid you of sugar cravings.
- Month four: Bring more raw food into your diet. Aim for 30-50% raw intake with foods such as salads, smoothies, raw soups (look online), lightly steamed veggies and raw veggie juices.
- Month five: Build more physical activity into your day through gardening, walking/cycling to and from shops/work, taking the stairs and not the lifts/escalators, walking the dog daily etc.
- Month six: Learn to breathe properly! Ask a yoga teacher to show you how it’s done. This can dramatically improve your health (oxygenation of cells means more alkaline cells, which in turn means a reduction in the potential for disease states to occur).
- Month seven: Get more sleep. It is vitally important for good health and weight management, so aim for early-ish nights (10.00/10.30pm) and try for 7-8 hours of uninterrupted sleep in a pitch-black environment.
- Month eight: Reduce the amount of processed food (packaged, pre-cooked, preserved, flavoured or coloured) in your diet. Start spending more time preparing and eating good quality, real food.
- Month nine: Start thinking about the things you think about! Mind management is one of the most challenging things to accomplish, but is undoubtedly the most important facet of good health. Keep in mind just how potently our inner thoughts impact on our emotions, which in turn impact on our physical state.
- Month 10: Eat your food in a relaxed environment to keep your parasympathetic system ‘switched on’ (this is the ‘rest and digest’ side of the nervous system). You can do this by avoiding any stressful thoughts/environments/actions, so get used to sitting down and enjoying your meal.
- Month 11: Chew your food until its liquid; this gives your body the time to recognise what enzymes are required to digest the food appropriately and to release them in the correct quantities. It also increases the surface area of food, allowing your stomach acid to work more effectively (killing any pathogens present on your food and helping you absorb certain key nutrients from your meal).
- Month 12: Stay relaxed about falling off the wagon. It’s never a good idea to try and do things perfectly … instead, aim to incorporate some not-so-healthy habits every now and then. After all, we live in a world full of temptations that promise great pleasure and frankly, life would be a little dull without giving in sometimes. Don’t wait until Monday to go back to your healthy habits; every hour/meal/day can afford you great benefits, so throwing in the towel and despairing about your past choices isn’t going to get you anywhere closer to your goals.
Above all, have fun and enjoy the process of becoming healthier.
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Tanya Wyatt
Owner at The Happy Body
Tanya started out as a professional ballet dancer. Swopping her pointe shoes for takkies, she decided being a hip hop dancer was way cooler, so chopped off her bun and joined a street dance company. For many years, she also taught dance and fitness classes in Cape Town before deciding that nutrition and lifestyle coaching was the way to help people change their state of health for the better. So, while writing two health and fitness books, she moved to London to study and began her ‘real life’ – that as a health and lifestyle coach. She’s been in private practice for 10 years now, is a mom of a 7-year old pig-tailed ball of energy, writes for various national and local health publications and is a health presenter when the occasion arises. Oh – and once a dancer, always a dancer – she’s also taken up ballet pole dancing 🙂
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You talk of salt. How can this AlgoFM advert for Merino table salt be tolerated.
The ad seems to be aimed at those who don’t know better. The emphasis seems to be on as much table salt as possible. This is false. Old SADF input was nothing more than a sprinkling of table salt to flavor food but not recomneded and this was for those going into the operational area for an extended period. The temperature been ave 40 Celsius. Himilayan table salt is another thing, there dose is 1 teaspoon of sol (liquid salt) per day. How can this advert be allowed?
Hi Donald. Many thanks for your comment and I wanted to make sure I understood it completely. When you say “How can this advert be allowed”, are you referring to the ad on Algoa (I don’t know it) as opposed to my recommendation of the Universal Vision brand of H salt? If so, I guess this is the nature of marketing, which is why it’s so important to do one’s own research and make buying decisions based on that. All I can say is that the brand I use provides excellent results and is tasty to boot…