Healthier Lifestyle
In today’s world, it’s easy to live an unhealthy life. Fried, fatty foods are always within an arm’s reach, office life means sitting in a sedentary position for eight hours, and an abundance of media products means our minds are always caught up in a virtual world. Looking to live a little bit like a healthy person? Plenty of small tweaks to your lifestyle can have a big impact on your overall well-being. Use the following simple tips to live a healthier lifestyle.
Increase Your Protein
The U.S. Dietary Guidelines recommend that an adult male get 10 percent of his daily calories from protein. However, other guidelines say that up to 35 percent of daily calories is acceptable. Either way, many of us are not reaching this limit.
Protein is essential for building muscle and fueling your body, which also has a lot to do with a healthier lifestyle. Without enough protein, you might feel tired, sluggish, and weak. Add in some more high-quality protein sources to avoid losing your strength. The goal is to avoid protein that is high in saturated fat, highly processed or contains sugar or sweeteners. Some examples of good protein to add to your diet include:
- Pink salmon
- Chicken breast
- Beans
- Greek yogurt
Try your best to come up with a diet consisting of healthy foods. You must learn to balance protein, carbohydrates, and healthy fats into your diet. Depending on your current position on the scale, switching to a high protein diet may be advantageous or disadvantageous. So make sure you know about your body well before making radical changes to your diet. Here are a couple of healthy recipes to help you start.
Avoid Technology Before Bed
Staring at your screen before you journey to slumberland can have many detrimental effects on your health. Research shows this habit makes you feel sleepier and less alert the next day. In one study that looked at people who read on iPads before bed and people who read books before bed, the iPad users felt less tired at bedtime, took a long time to fall asleep, and had shorter REM cycles.
To prevent lack of sleep from hurting your health, skip the technology before bed. If you have to check your phone, get an app that filters out blue light to help your eyes and mind relax.
Exercise at Your Desk
Humans were not designed to sit still for eight hours at a time. Even if you’re active after work, that still doesn’t make up for the time you spent sedentary. When you sit for long periods of time on an everyday basis, you have an increased risk for health conditions like heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and anxiety.
How can you avoid this? The answer is simple: sit less. Take a walk break every half hour to stretch, lift weights with a free hand, or do leg raises. Anything can help. While you’re at it, check some of the best fitness tips on the internet to get you moving throughout the day and obtain a healthy body.
Improve Your Indoor Air Quality
To ensure a healthier lifestyle and healthy living at home, having poor indoor air quality in your home can lead to a number of issues, including allergies, asthma, or even cancer. Your home should be your sanctuary from the outside world, not a place where you feel sick and uncomfortable all the time.
The American Lung Association estimates that 50 percent of Americans deal with poor indoor air quality. One way to fix this issue is by installing a clean air filter in your HVAC system. These filters work to purify the air circulating your home, removing debris, carcinogens, and mildew.
Never Avoid Your Vegetables
A healthy diet should consist of at least five servings of vegetables daily. Try and eat your vegetables raw, stir-fried or steamed. Research has proven that a diet rich in vegetables can help reduce the risk of developing cancers of the colon, cervix, breast, lung, stomach, bladder, ovaries, and pancreas. On top of that, many of the most powerful phytonutrients are contained within vegetables such as cabbage, tomatoes, leafy greens, carrots, and broccoli.
Have Plenty of Sleep
Sleeping undisturbed through the night for a minimum of 6 hours is very important for healthy living. If you are having trouble sleeping at night, you could try tried and tested techniques like meditation and yoga to relax before going to bed. You could also try eating a small bedtime snack that may help put your body and mind into sleep mode. Some of the foods that help you sleep include cherries, whole grain cereal with milk, and chamomile tea.
If that still doesn’t help you sleep, try and improve your room conditions by turning your room darker than usual and making sure that the clock does not face towards you. Write down all your worries and stressful thoughts on a piece of paper to get them out of your head. This will relax your mind and will help you sleep better.
There’s so much more you can do to live a healthier lifestyle. Start here and keep working towards your health goals to create a better you.
