Part One: Developing Sustainable Habits and A Balanced Lifestyle

How to Develop Good Habits (and How to Make Them Stick Around)

Science these days says it takes about 66 days on average (that’s just over two months) to form a new habit. (21 days was the previously accepted number… except it was never based in fact!) It does, however, get a little more complicated when you talk about forming fitness habits (the study linked about says that fitness plans take a little longer to stick).

 

But there is good news: building new, healthy habits doesn’t require you to upend your entire life overnight. The process should be slower, take some time, and allow for you to adjust to your own balanced lifestyle.

 

Down below, in Part Two, we outline the habits you should form for living well. But first, up here in Part One, we’re helping you figure out how the heck to form good habits in general.

 

Lifehacks to Form Good Habits

 

Write Your Goal (and Habits) Down

To record your goal is to actualize your goal. But when you start to break that goal down into steps, you’ll notice that a lot of the steps are part of habit building (a goal of being able to lift 200 pounds, for example, requires you to go to the gym three to five times a week… that’s the start of a gym-going habit).

 

Don’t Overcomplicate It

Making huge, routine-and-life-altering changes are hard to sustain from the get-go. If what you want is to eat well, don’t expect yourself to make a new, healthy recipe every night. Instead, break it down: decide on one meal you want to make that week and prep it for lunch. Start slow – this is not a zero-to-sixty situation.

 

Give Yourself a Set Time

Commit to a time period – 30 days, 60 days, 90 days – to practice the habit that you want to form. This leads us to our next tip… having a set time period helps you see where you’re killing it and where you need work.

 

Be Kind to Yourself

During your first 30/60/90 days, consider what you’re doing as an experiment. That means you can withhold judgement – no punishing yourself if you skipped a day or two. Instead, like in tip number one, record why you didn’t accomplish what you wanted to. Our bet is that you will begin to find patterns in your behavior that you subconsciously lean into when you’re not focused in hard enough on your goals. These are the habits you’ll want to break as you move out of your experimental period.

 

Find Support

Maybe you and your friend have similar healthy lifestyle goals, but neither of you have had success in accomplishing them. Make them your gym buddy. Or, if you prefer to work alone, alert your loved ones of your goals and ask that they gently push you in the right direction while you’re trying to form these new, good habits. When you have someone to hold you accountable, you’re more likely to succeed.

 

Remove Temptation BUT Have Stand-Ins at the Ready: Say you’re trying to stop having sugary drinks. Remove those temptations: get rid of all of your sodas, as well as BAD stand-ins (sugary juices or candy). Instead, have seltzer at the ready… so now, you can have a flavored drink that helps you get your carbonation fix without the harmful sugar and chemicals.

 

Consistency Is Key

When you’re starting out, practice your habit daily. (If consistent working out is your goal habit, build in at least one true rest day, and make sure to rotate muscle groups to prevent injury). The more you practice, the faster it will become an automatic process. The more you skip a day, the harder it will be to make your habit, well, a habit.

Developing ways to sustain healthy habits is the major foundation of leading a healthy

lifestyle. As the saying goes, “We are what we repeatedly do.” But what, exactly, do we

need to repeatedly do so that we can be healthier, more fulfilled, and live life well?

Part Two: The Pillars of a Healthy Lifestyle

Determining what’s healthy for YOUR body might look different than someone else’s health plan. But there are a few foundational principles that apply pretty much universally to every body – and we and the rest of the Jersey Strong family can attest to the fact that simple changes like these can make truly change your life. First, the easy stuff.

You Probably Aren’t Drinking Enough Water

Chances are you’re not getting enough water (you’re not alone!). You should be drinking about half-a-gallon (that’s 64 ounces) of water a day. There are plenty of reasons to do this: water lubricates our joints, it helps keep skin clear, it provides a cushion for our brain and spinal cord, it helps us regulate our blood pressure, our body temperature, and our personal waste, it prevents kidney damage and helps us improve performance in the gym; the list goes on.

If you’re used to subbing coffee or soda in for water, getting half-a-gallon of water in your system each day can be surprisingly hard… but there are a few ways you can make it happen.

Get a dedicated water bottle (or two!). Make this part of your essential checklist in the mornings… keys, wallet, phone, water bottle.

Set some hydration time goals (We’re serious!). Try, for instance, to drink the whole bottle by noon, and then refill it.

Not good at self-management? There are apps to help remind you to drink water! Try this one to help you get started.

Nail Down Your Morning Routine

Seize the Day!

Unless you’re one of the lucky few true morning birds out there, mornings can be tough. And we get it – we snooze alarms, too. But especially for busy people, creating a morning routine can be the difference between a good day and a bad day. Plus, in theory, it’s simple: it requires us to nail down about an hour’s worth of good habits. To get an in-depth breakdown of creating a morning routine, go here, but we’ve outlined some quick tips for you here:

Stick to the First Alarm

If you’re a serial snoozer, this is going to be the hard part. Instead of giving into the admittedly-cozy-but-otherwise-unhelpful “five more minutes,” simply set your alarm for a realistic wake-up call, and open the curtains when it chimes.

Hydrate & Eat

You’ve gone 8 hours (ideally) without drinking or eating anything. They don’t call it break-fast for nothing! Drink a glass of water right when you wake up (some studies show that this has the same affect as coffee) and eat your meal-prepped food at your table, not your desk.

Carve Out YOUR Time

Whether that’s exercise, reading, or simply sitting still to gather your thoughts for the day ahead, make sure you have time dedicated to you and your own goals. Make your mornings time that is dedicated simply to you.

Set Your Goal for the Day

Having just one thing that you can accomplish each day will help make your daily work week routine feel less like a grind and more like a journey. Set your goal and shape your day around it.

Be Consistent

Even if you’re the spontaneous type, having a morning routine that doesn’t deviate day-to-day makes it easier to implement. The rest of the day will be unpredictable. Make your morning your safe time.

Rethink Your Sleeping Patterns

Finally, an Excuse to Go to Bed

Sleep is one of THE most important aspects of our health. Scientists still haven’t nailed down exactly why we sleep so often, but they HAVE determined what happens if we don’t get enough sleep. None of them are good:

1. Your immune system weakens

Count on that winter cold, especially if you’re not sleeping enough.

2. Your heart health worsens

This goes for both too much AND too little sleep, but consistent nights of five hours or less greatly increase your risk of heart disease or stroke.

3. You gain weight

One study followed over 20,000 people over the course of three years... and it found that people who slept five hours or less a night were more likely to eventually become obese.

4. Your skin gets worse

Less sleep = wrinkles, loose skin, uneven skin tone (The term beauty sleep is more than just a cliché!).

Of course, getting sleep is dependent on a whole host of other factors: your stress levels, your mental health (depression and anxiety, in addition to making you sleep too much, can prevent you from sleeping at all), your work-life balance, how much you exercise, screen time before bed. If you’re finding that you are having difficulty sleeping, try:

Banning screens in the bedroom

Moving your body once a day

Create an evening routine to help your mind shut down

Meditation

How to Create a Workout Routine

Work It Out

Fitness habits form through routine. Once you’ve got that routine down pat, you’re in the clear. But making that routine is a whole other story. Still, if you’ve got the drive, there are small hacks that you can take advantage to put you on the right path. Here are some of them.

Schedule Workouts in Your Calendar

You take calendar meetings seriously. Why should scheduled workouts be any different? Scheduling out your fitness goals in your calendar helps in a number of ways: it lets you visually see how your personal life fits in with your professional one (Yes, it’s possible for them to live side-by-side!), it helps you plan ahead and around other “life” stuff, and handy-dandy calendar pop-ups hold you accountable.

Get a Friend

We already talked about the benefits of having pals in on the fun with you. If you aren’t a self-starter (there is no shame in this!), having a buddy along for the ride will help hold you accountable and motivate you on the days you’re feeling low.

Sign Up for Fitness Classes

Alternatively, you can hold yourself accountable by committing to fitness classes throughout the week. If you don’t have a workout buddy, these are a great alternative (and a great way to meet people). Check out our fitness classes at any one of our Jersey Strong locations and see why they can help you stay on track.

Get a Personal Trainer

Obviously, we love personal training. But especially for beginners or people who have hit their fitness plateaus, a personal trainer can help get you out of a rut and into a plan. You can read more about our personal training options here!

Take Active Rest Days

You’ve reached a rest day! Congrats! But in the habit-forming stage, it’s best NOT to just sit on the couch all day if you can help it. Go to yoga, go for a walk with the dog, go for a light, easy run… moving every day is good for you AND your habits.

How to Make Healthier Food Choices

Reboot Your Diet

Healthy eating is a series of compounded habits (what’s sometimes called “habit stacking”). When we’re habit stacking, it means that we’re layering good habits over good habits. These stacks basically create a chain of healthy choices and help us think about those choices in terms of steps.

For example, a great habit stack or chain might be: Look up healthy recipes  write down ingredients in a grocery list  go to the grocery store  come back and meal prep for the week Here are a few quick tips to help you move towards making those healthy choices:

Reset

Many Americans have a pretty negative relationship with food. We use food as reward to celebrate milestones like holidays and birthdays; we use it as a crutch if we’re feeling sad or depressed; we use it as a way to deal with boredom. But food started as necessary fuel to keep us healthy and active. Reset your thinking around food: think of it as a fun way to add value to your day, not as a reward.

Remove Temptation

We already went over this a little, but when you’re trying to develop healthy eating habits, remove foods that pull at your weaknesses. You can add these back in later when you have the self-control to moderate.

Meal Prep

It’s the simplest way to guarantee that you will eat right. Meal prep every meal – breakfast, lunch, and dinner – so that you have no reason not to eat right.

Cheat

Yeah, we said it. Especially in the beginning stages of forming good eating habits, allow yourself to cheat in tiny (and we mean tiny) ways. Eat a cheat meal on a Saturday, or eat one square of dark chocolate as dessert each night. Restrictive eating won’t help you in the same way that binging won’t help you. You can think of habits as bad or good, but steer clear of assigning value to food. Instead, think of certain foods as ones that are warmer or colder in terms of how much closer they bring you to your goal… and allow yourself to get colder here and there.

Make Self-Care a Priority

It’s Okay to Make It About You Self-care has been a bit co-opted these days, especially by the wellness industry. It’s a phrase we usually target towards women, and that we associate with beauty and indulgence. But self-care isn’t about facemasks and a bowl of ice cream after a long day (and it’s definitely not just for women).

It is, put simply, acts of putting yourself first.

So much of our lives is about other people: shepherding the kids back and forth to school or activities, making sure you’re meeting goals at work to impress your boss or hit the bottom line, taking care of your dog or cleaning the house. Sometimes it can seem like there truly IS no time for you, and when we feel like we’re in autopilot simply to get through the week, that’s probably an indicator that we need to take a step back and make time.

What Self-Care Is:

• Taking alone time when you need it.
• Going outside for a walk if you need sunshine.
• Sleeping in on the weekend or getting up for a run.
• Learning to say no.

What Self-Care Is NOT:

• Consistent acts of indulgence under the guise of “I need this,” like drinking or binging.
• External stimulus like facemasks (though, never underestimate the power of a spa day!).
• Turning away from challenges that can better you as a part of practicing saying “no.”

The Benefits of Calming Your Mind (and How to Do It)

Be Still

Meditation is not fluff. It can help you improve your gym routine, heighten your focus, and either start your day or shut down from a long week. It also has pretty impressive health benefits, including altering your brain chemistry to help you deal with stress, improve your memory, and possibly even prevent genetic damage from things like chemotherapy. Start with these four simple steps:

Dedicate One Spot to Your Practice

Make it quiet, private, comfortable, and not your bed. Dedicating one spot to your practice helps your brain switch into meditation mode once you’re there.

Make It Part of Your Morning Routine

Make it the very start of your day: before breakfast, before you wake up your roommates/family/partner, make meditation what you do when you get out of bed.

Use Focus Techniques

Especially when you’re first starting out, you will probably find it hard to stay focused. Try using techniques such as a body scan – where you focus on relaxing every single part of your body from your toes to your forehead.

There’s an App for That

Meditation apps like Headspace help beginners focus in on their practice. This is one of the few cases where technology can actually benefit your mental health!

Everything You Need to Know About Today’s Top Diets
And How to Choose the Best One for You

One big part of choosing a weight loss diet is learning to respect what your body responds to. Did you try that (insert name here) detox and lose 10 pounds, only to gain it all back a week later? Did you give keto a go but find that it wasn’t sustainable for you? Did you get on Weight Watchers only the fall off the bandwagon? It’s totally possible your heart wasn’t in it—It happens!—but it might also be true that that diet simply wasn’t the one for you. Here, we’ll outline some of today’s most popular and visible eating plans so that you can choose the one that will work best for your preferences and body. We’ve broken them down into two categories: dieting methods and the nutrition plans themselves.

Dieting Methods

In some cases, a weight loss plan might not be in what you eat, but in how you eat it (or how you track it). Still, it’s about a balance: intermittent fasting won’t work if the only thing you’re eating is junk food when mealtime comes. With that in mind, here are a few ways you can structure your food plan:

• Intermittent Fasting. The research on whether or not this method of eating—which requires you to go certain long-ish periods of time (anywhere from 16 to 24 hours) without food—is actually good for your health long-term is sparse. But fasters swear by it, and some studies show that it can be good for your heart, help you lose weight, knock down your blood sugar levels, and increase cellular repair processes. The most common form of fasting is the 16:8 method—16 hours of no eating between 8 hour periods of eating as normal (i.e., lunch and dinner and a snack).
• Calorie Counting. Calorie restriction used to be the classic way to lose weight. There is a right way to count calories, and that’s to calculate the base amount of calories your body needs to lose weight according to your goals—without starving itself. When you eat too little, your body will react the exact opposite way you want it to: in starvation mode, your body hangs on to weight and stores fat. If you’re tracking calories in a healthy way, you should be losing no more than 1-2 pounds a week. Apps like My Fitness Pal can help you determine what a healthy goal should be.
• Macro Dieting. Macro dieting is a more food science-y way to look at your diet. It’s mathy like calorie counting, but more informed in terms of the makeup of your food. On a macro diet, you count the grams of protein, carbs, and fats in each food and calculate the ratios you need to meet your weight loss goals. One of the benefits of this diet is you know the molecular level of your food…which helps you understand exactly where your calories are coming from. It also helps you ration out your food in a more positive, informed way, because it helps you determine exactly what kinds of nutrients your body is getting Collapse

What is it:

The Mediterranean diet is meant to help you build healthy eating patterns that will last a lifetime. It’s consistently rated as the healthiest and easiest diet to adhere to on the market right now. That said, it allows for some fattening ingredients—avocados and olives, oils, the offhand glass of red wine, etc.—so it’s worth noting that weight loss on this diet requires a little bit of planning. That said, it blocks processed foods and sugars and requires recipe experimentation (and cheat meals—like the occasional whole grain pasta dish or dark chocolate—are not only allowed, but encouraged on occasion).