Living longer and healthier should be the goal of every person. Working out and aiming to eat healthier are all great starts for someone trying to cultivate a healthier life, but it’s not enough. To truly improve your health, you must develop a lifestyle that reflects habits of clean living. Let’s dive deeper into this dynamic topic so that you can learn how to create your very own lifestyle to lead a healthier life.
What Is A Lifestyle?
The first step to learning how to be healthier is to identify what a lifestyle is. In short, a person’s lifestyle is how they live their life on a day-to-day basis and the habits that they follow. For example, let’s look at two different situations:
Person A has been a long-time smoker who doesn’t exercise on a regular basis, doesn’t believe in wearing seatbelts or following the rules of the road, and consistently eats out rather than cooking their own food. Person B exercises moderately, doesn’t drink or smoke, and always buckles up before hitting the road.
In this hypothetical situation, Person B has a higher likelihood of living a long life due to their healthy habits, whereas Person A is more likely to cause somebody to reach out to a personal injury lawyer because they caused a car accident due to their negligence of smoking and driving.
What Habits Are Associated With A Healthy Lifestyle?
Asking anybody what a healthy lifestyle means to them will result in a variety of different answers. After all, health looks different from person-to-person. With that said, a study by the National Institute of Health collected data from five health factors to determine if they had a major impact on longevity. The team concluded that women and men who adopted the five healthy lifestyle habits lived 14.1 and 13.1 years longer, respectively.
Using these as a baseline, the five healthy lifestyle habits were:
- Maintaining a healthy eating pattern.
- Not smoking.
- Getting at least 3.5 hours of vigorous exercise every week.
- Drinking only moderate amounts of alcoho.
- Maintaining a normal weight in accordance with your body mass index.
Therefore, while health can look different from person-to-person, the above tips are a great diving off point.
How To Cultivate A Better Lifestyle
Cultivating a healthier lifestyle starts with the small things. For example, start by cutting back on the alcohol and eating out, as opposed to making food. From there, consider cutting out alcohol completely and stop ordering food completely as well. Cultivating a healthier lifestyle is about taking baby steps to implement healthier habits every day.
For those who want to reduce screen time, consider taking 30-minutes without your phone every day, eventually working up the time each week. There’s no right or wrong way to build a healthy lifestyle, so long as you slowly replace the bad with the good.
Improve your health and wellness
It’s never too late to create a lifestyle that bolsters both health and wellness. You may have been trying to kick bad habits for years, and that’s perfectly fine. The best time to start is now. Take ownership over your life and integrate health habits on a daily basis in order to start building a lifestyle that keep you looking young and healthy for years to come.
