Maintaining a healthy lifestyle is actually easier than most people realize. It starts with the right mindset – and once you have that mindset, once you care about how you live your life and what you put into your body, it’s easy to make the right choices.
When people tell me they find it hard to resist fast food, I tell them my own story. I grew up in a very healthy home however once I moved away, maintaining a healthy lifestyle was difficult. Fast food soon became my weakness. Since it was easy on my wallet, I had it about once a week and loved it. Quick, tasty and inexpensive. Then I was given the book Fast Food Nation and there was no going back for me! It weaned me off fast food forever.
Still, the thought of fast food continued to be alluring, until one day, after about two years of staying away from fast food, I entered a fast food place to meet a friend. The stench was overwhelming! I had to leave. As it turns out, if you stay away from fast food long enough, the smell that you used to consider as “tempting” becomes practically disgusting. The strong odor of non-fresh food cooked in grease becomes revolting.
In other words, once you stop eating junk, and get your body retrained to prefer natural foods and your taste buds to enjoy the more subtle flavors of fresh foods, you won’t even miss junk anymore.
Maintaining a healthy lifestyle certainly requires a certain amount of personal responsibility. The food industry does everything it can to shove junk down our throats, but we don’t have to act like helpless victims. Educate yourself, read labels carefully, question statistics and “research,” and work to find what is best for you and for your family through trial and error. Learn to respect your body and its needs and plan for long term health and wellness instead of satisfying short-term cravings induced by advertising.
Above all, remember that maintaining a healthy lifestyle means ignoring trends. Stick to the basic health premise that we should do things the way nature intended us to do them. Isolated or paired down foods are not easy for the body to recognize or to digest. Stick with the basics – the foods that your great grandparents used to eat – a variety of grains (soaked!) fresh fruit and vegetables in season, whole milk, eggs, fish, organic chicken and beef, homemade soup stocks, olive oil, and real butter. Even the health food industry is still an industry and it still pushes things on us that we don’t really need, such as artificial sweeteners, low fat foods and disturbingly highly processed energy bars.
Adopting and maintaining a healthy lifestyle often involves a personal transformation that includes respecting oneself more and understanding why we made the unhealthy choices in the first place. Once the belief about oneself and what is healthy has changed, it’s much harder to bring home junk food and to put it into our bodies.
These are my thoughts on living a healthy and simple life. I'm a modern mom with some simple ideas, a little common sense and a natural philosophy. This is the sanest way I know how to navigate the 21 century.
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clean environment, fresh air, relaxing clean air. Those are another form of living in healthy.
These are really great reminders, the trends that people follow are not only pushing them in the “un-healthy” direction are also creating a manic personality of always rushing to the next trend. Confidence in what someone is doing for their health, is huge!