How can you walk into heathy habits? Starting a healthier lifestyle is a lifesaving decision. Healthy habits build from many small steps in the right direction. Each journey starts with one step. Small steps for a big change. Moving from decision to doing can be fun-filled, real simple and make sense to you. Short snippets of time in the beginning leads you on a walk into healthy habits. There is no use talking about nutrition, fitness and mindfulness until you know what this means deep down. That comes later. For now: Let’s stay with food, moving and attitude. Walk into healthy habits one step at a time with a lifestyle change plan that works.
Walk Into Healthy Habits: Trigger – Action – Benefit
Old habits are hard to break. We are conditioned to think that someone else should bring us a pill to cure us, or a miracle weight loss machine that will take care of the ‘problem’ with little effort on our part.
The Lifestyle Change Plan – thegoodista.com
A habit is a recurrent, often unconscious, pattern of behaviour that is acquired through frequent repetition. Good or bad habits depend on triggers that lead to an action which you benefit from in some way. Habits are so ingrained that breaking them will require effort and conscious decisions each time a trigger is presented to you.
There is no magic bullet. Each person has a unique set of circumstances and individual needs. Therefore wellness and healthy choices have to be made by you. This can be a challenge, since we are each unique in our bodies but also unique in our pattern of bad habits and poor lifestyle choices.
You know why you decided to be a bit healthier. The challenge now is how to start.
Walk Into Healthy Habits: Breaking Bad Habits
Making new years resolutions seldom work as goals are set too high for you to feel you can ever achieve them.
The power to break a habit belongs to the one who made it, by making a conscious choice to adapt a new pattern. Conditioning is hard to break and unconscious behaviour needs to be brought to the forefront for you to undo them.
You Are What You Eat (if you know how)
Once you become aware, your mind begins to pay attention. The brain has a great ability to change and adapt, but the awareness stage is key for anyone to achieve a new way of thinking and acting.
Your resolve, discipline and good intentions has the power to create change.
The practical dilemma is how to use your strengths and motivation to help yourself remain committed to wellness as a lifetime pattern. Chopra.com
Moving from decision to change to actually walk into healthy habits is not a mountain to climb, but rather a number of healthier choices done daily. In the beginning you will have to find triggers to make you action a healthier choice and the benefit is of course that you feel good and gain health. After a while the new daily actions become part of your routine. You will have formed healthy habits.
Walk Into Healthy Habits: 5 Steps To Success
When starting a walk into healthy habits, you will already know what has made you take a decision to move away from a certain way of life.
It does not matter where you start, or which area you pick first. As someone who has moved from a certified couch potato to a fit (Wow! Am I proud to say this!) person – I know that one small change step promotes the next. If you want a method that works, look at the 5 x 5 Success Plan to get a healthier life.
How to get a healthier life with the 5 x 5 success plan for real lifestyle change.
The best way to reach a healthier lifestyle is to break down your day: Waking up. Breakfast. Work. Lunch. Work. Dinner. Bedtime. Each of these words means something to you right now, and when and what can trigger a ‘bad’ habit action.
Good new habits only become habits once they are ingrained, so making conscious healthier choices will have to be simple, doable, easy-to-make changes.
5 x 5 Pick and Mix Menu for A Healthier Life
My pick and mix menu for lifestyle change works. 5 areas, 5 tips, 5 minutes. You can choose which area to start with, as you will get encouraged to try other new healthier ways by the results you get. The areas you can pick from are:
Exercise for health. Daily snippets of time dedicated to purposefully moving your body. Here are 5 tips that take 5 minutes: 5 x 5 Exercise Tips- Good food that brings health into your body where losing weight is a nice side effect: 5 x 5 Healthy Food Tips.
- Drinking enough to detox and balance your body system: 5 x 5 Hydration Tips.
- Resting and sleeping for recovery and energy: 5 x 5 Good Rest Tips.
- Me-time to think, and find your own space in a hectic life: 5 x 5 Me-Time Tips.
Give yourself time to walk into healthy habits. It is not a highway to hell, it is a path to long-lasting lifestyle change. Learn, get inspired and motivate yourself to becoming a ‘New You‘. Step by step you get there. If you trip up now and again don’t beat yourself up, as you can readjust, tweak and change along the way.
Walk Into Healthy Habits: Walking for Exercise
There is one thing that makes a huge difference when you start to change your lifestyle: Walking.
Walking put me on the path to a healthier life. The trigger used to be to come home and have a glass of wine to unwind from a stressful day. My healthy habit decision was to use the trigger of coming home to actively prompt me into taking a walk with my dog instead.
After a week of consciously choosing to walk for 10 minutes every evening, I felt elated, happier and energised. The evening walks became longer, and the dinner that followed became more focused on vegetables, and the wine bottle remained unopened. There is a direct connection between that first choice to walk to the fit person I am today. 
The US surgeon general recently released a call for action detailing the benefits of walking for 20 minutes a day. Research has found how walking significantly cuts the risk of diabetes, dementia, depression, colon cancer, cardiovascular disease, anxiety, and high blood pressure by 40 percent or more. Harvard medical school confirms that the surprising benefits of walking are so important that it is the closest thing to a wonder drug.
Walk: Step by Step
FitBit – Tracks activity, calories and steps
Walk into health. Yes. Walk. Every day. The best way to get into exercise is to put one step in front of the other. When you start walking after being sedentary, just 10 minutes a day will make a difference, after which you can increase.
Aim for at least 30 minutes a day, or 10,000 steps. Tracking your newfound exercise is easily done with a pedometer, or a Fitness Band and Activity Tracker. These tools are really helpful as they encourage you to go on, do more and even give you prizes for your efforts.
Walking for exercise can be great fun, and these tips from WikiHow will make you smile but do make sense: 11 Steps How To Start Walking for Exercise.
Walk Into Healthy Habits: Lasting Lifestyle Change
Healthy choices create healthy habits, and healthy habits create healthy lifestyles. You know why you have decided to live longer, healthier and have more energy. Getting healthier means learning more, and getting into new things.
The GOODista recommends Health is a Habit by Julie Smedley Massey. This book 
The road ahead is filled with challenges, and forks where choices have to be made. It is a journey that is worth every effort, and it does not matter how old you are.
The decision is yours, and your way to a healthier lifestyle is unique. You can pick and mix from a huge menu of healthy new habits that make sense to you and your life. The important part is to not stress yourself, or get downtrodden, if you get off course. You can pick yourself up, and continue. The result is long-lasting change that really makes you Feel, Be and Do Good – Every Day!
Get Inspired on thegoodista.com
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Recommended and Related:
- 107 Healthy Habits For a Healthier Lifestyle – feelhappiness.com
- 301 Ultimate Healthier Habits List – seven insights.com
- 5 Steps for Creating Healthy Habits – The Chopra Center
- Walking Workouts – Fitness Magazine
- 5 Surprising Benefits of Walking – Harvard Health
- 9 Problems with New Dietary Guidelines – Care2
- Healthy Home Essentials – Amazon
What Made You Decide To Be Healthier? Comments:
Thank you, I do join in. Your blog is so precious as you present us with well researched scientific and digestible tips for easy, everyday use.
And congratulations on your own achievements, truly impressive!
Thanks for reading and commenting! 🙂 The GOODista works hard on writing and finding accurate and relevant research that make sense for everyday healthy living – whether you’re at home or work (far) away.
Thank you for a great article about creating healthy habits. The GOODista presents some of the most timely health information available, I share all of their newsletters because they are the best on the Internet. Thank you also for recommending my book, “Health is a Habit”.
Dear Julie, What a delight to get your comments! Your book “health is a habit’ makes so much sense as it is a primer and a tool for anyone who seeks to improve their lifestyle. If you ever consider guest blogging The GOODista would be honoured 🙂