Sustainability and a Well-Balanced Lifestyle

Adopting and creating a healthier lifestyle for nutrition and resistance training (working out) can be challenging. Breaking old habits and managing a healthy meal plan with a proper gym routine around daily living activities can be overwhelming and unsustainable. Having the thought to make changes for a healthier lifestyle is a positive first step to achieve results. There are tips and tricks that can be used to help sustain new healthy habits and maintain a regular routine around meal planning and workouts.

Tip #1 Knowledge. When an individual has the knowledge of understanding what they're eating and why they're consuming it, along with an understanding of weights being lifted and why they're lifting them, it will help immensely. This helps provide an individual with developing autonomy (the act of self-governance). It can make the concept of nutrition and resistance training easier and will create results.

Tip #2 Incorporating a healthy meal plan and workout routine into your lifestyle. Nutrition: If an individual is looking to start a healthy meal plan, there are a few key things to understand. These include: understanding what food will be consumed, how to make it taste good (cooking), and how to find balance around a workout routine and daily living activities.

To learn more about nutrition please visit: https://dietfithealth.com/pages/nutrition-fundamentals

This will be about time management. This applies to strategically breaking up the week to include meal planning, grocery shopping, and cooking. These tasks require energy and can be draining if they consume too much available time in a day or week. An individual could become discouraged and resent their diet. When in fact, they should be enjoying the food they consume because it’s nutritious and tastes good. 

Here are some more tricks and tips to help with a healthy well-balanced lifestyle:

1) Grocery shop and cook on two different days. 
2) Use rest days and days off to cook and do other errands.
3) Prepare for exercise/workouts before you leave the house.
4) 3 Month Rule.

Tip 1) Grocery shopping and cooking on two different days: This is an important tip for anyone looking to start a healthy meal plan/diet or get into a healthy and active lifestyle. Meal planning and grocery shopping use up energy. When an individual gets home from grocery shopping, they may feel tired, and having to cook right away or later that day can be strenuous, tiring, and stressful. This can take up a full day, and they may not have other days off throughout the week. This can take a toll on them physically and mentally. Not getting a few rest days throughout the week can add up and can lead to inconsistencies in maintaining their new healthy lifestyle. When time management is utilized and an individual has two different days of the week to do grocery shopping and cooking, they gain at least two half days to rest and relax. This is healthier for their physical and mental health, which will help them keep going until they reach their goals. Dividing cooking days throughout the week can also be helpful to avoid using a large amount of energy and losing a day off if they cook all at once. Also, consuming leftovers from previous meals will allow more time throughout different days to rest and relax and can work around a workout routine (not cooking and training on the same day). This can be beneficial as there can be 2-3 cooking days throughout the week that provide an individual with the food in their meal plan. This is a good approach for people who aren’t picky with their food because they're consuming the same meals for the upcoming days. Having healthy snacks in between meals can also help to provide a different flavor and can suppress hunger. Assigning grocery shopping and cooking to two different days can lead to a healthier, more sustainable lifestyle, better food consumption, and more rest and relaxation time.

Key Note: Having groceries delivered or prepared for pickup offers significant benefits for maintaining a balanced lifestyle by saving both time and energy. This convenience reduces the physical and mental effort of navigating crowded stores, waiting in lines, and carrying heavy bags, allowing more energy to be directed toward cooking healthy meals, exercising, or spending quality time with family.

It also supports better meal planning and healthier food choices, as shopping lists can be organized in advance, reducing impulse purchases. By minimizing stress and conserving energy, grocery delivery or pickup services contribute to a more efficient routine and a healthier, more balanced way of living.

 

Tip 2) Utilize Rest Days & Days Off: Fitness levels can be increased with less volume and time spent in the gym. It is a science, and it’s how the body works. This means rest days are vital to see and feel improvements with physical and mental health. Working a full-time job takes up most of an individual's energy. By adding workouts before or after a work schedule, it can use up most of their remaining energy. It's important to take rest days to relax, recharge, and accomplish other daily living activities (errands, cooking, cleaning, socializing).

By allowing multiple rest days a week into a schedule, it can lead to a better and healthier lifestyle and will positively impact fitness levels during workouts. Rest is important for workouts and fitness as it allows time for the muscles to recover. 48 hours is the minimum amount of time needed for muscles that have been trained before they can be trained again.

Tip 3) Preparing for exercise and workouts: Utilizing time throughout the day to prepare for a workout can be helpful. When the workday is over, people want to get home, which can lead to excuses to miss a planned workout because of the comfort of home. When an individual gets home from work, they still have energy from the workday to accomplish other tasks that may need to get done, but that energy slowly starts to decrease as an individual unwinds and begins to relax. Tasks that need to get done around the home may be missed due to relaxing and sitting down too early. This also applies to working out.

When someone arrives at home to prepare themselves for a workout, there are other temptations that a home offers that may lead to missing a workout if discipline isn't maintained. Preparing oneself for a workout after work rather than going home right away avoids the temptations that a home has and uses the extra energy an individual has after work to arrive at the gym. This includes bringing a gym bag, clothes, water bottle, and everything else one needs for exercise. This also has the benefit of being more time-efficient. This is helpful to create more consistency with exercising and successfully completing workouts. Consistency is important in order for the body to promote physical adaptations to get results. Preparing for a workout before you leave the house can be helpful to create more consistency, time efficiency, avoiding temptations, and utilizing energy expenditure.

Tip 4) 3 Month Rule: Making lifestyle changes can be challenging. It can be helpful to look at progress in time periods. The 3-month rule can be used as a benchmark to measure progress and success after making lifestyle changes. The reason being is that the body needs time and consistency in order to change in a healthy and positive way. It’s about applying the principles of resistance training in the gym and workouts and nutrition/meal planning outside of the gym to achieve great results. A key to success is consistency with workouts and nutrition.

This rule is more focused on a workout routine because when the principles of resistance training are applied, the body will experience shock effects in their muscles that are considered a physical adaptation. It’s the body telling the person this is a stimulation/sensation that will promote muscle growth. When experienced, this feeling confirms that success has been achieved in creating more muscle that will increase fitness levels. The body is adapting and growing more muscle. This is why consistency is important because the body needs time to get used to the volume (reps & sets) and intensity (weight) in order for it to experience a new stimulation with different volume or intensity. When the muscles are regularly shocked, an individual will constantly gain more muscle and achieve better results. This is why the first metric to measure success should be around 3 months. It helps an individual not feel overwhelmed with a lifestyle change and allows the body time to build muscle to shock them and gain progressive results.

Summary

Consistency and a balanced lifestyle combined with rest and recovery days, cooking/meal planning, and a workout routine can help an individual achieve their health goals.

To learn more about the principles of resistance training please visit: https://dietfithealth.com/pages/principles-of-resistance-training

To learn more about nutrition please visit: https://dietfithealth.com/pages/nutrition-fundamentals

To learn more about rest days please visit: https://dietfithealth.com/pages/rest-days