We all want to eat healthier, but it’s easier said than done. There are many factors that force us to make the decisions we do about our diets. Fast food like burgers, and junk food snacks are often much cheaper than organic produce or high-quality groceries. This unfortunately ties health to money a lot of the time.
There are other habits we have that also derail a healthy diet even when we do commit to one. The amount of sleep you get nightly, the consumption of caffeine and cigarettes, and lack of exercise are detrimental to the human body no matter what you eat.
We’ll discuss how diets also help seemingly unrelated parts of your life, like getting life insurance with medical conditions. When you eat healthily and show your life insurance company that you care about bringing your risk factors down, it can present you with cheaper policy rates.
Find a Fun Activity
No matter how good your diet is, a lack of physical activity will make it hard to maintain good health. The body needs exercise, and it’s important to find something fun and exciting that will motivate you to get moving. This is largely dependent on your financial situation, as gym memberships are expensive, and the weather, as this will allow you to exercise outside.
If you are young enough to engage in contact sports like basketball or football, try to gather enough friends to go to the park and have some fun. Sports are such a positive way to work out a variety of muscles, and they help you interact with friends and make some new ones along the way.
In this way, exercising is just as beneficial to your mental health as your physical health. When you are on a new diet, it can be hard to maintain it if you don’t have any joy connected to being healthy.
Often we miss some of the sweets and junk food that we ate in our previous diets. Leaning on the experience of fun activity can distract from the fact that our routine has changed. Talk to your doctor about what sports are right for your age group. You don’t have to have a devastating injury because you tried to play soccer at 65 years old.
Bad Snacking Must Be Stopped
Snacking is the biggest reason that it is hard to maintain a healthy diet. You may eat healthy meals every day, but when you get a craving for some candy in the afternoon, this turns into a bad habit that will detract from your overall health. It’s all about having easy access to healthy snacks that have low sugar.
Natural food is always better than artificial food. If you need something sweet, snack on a few pieces of raw fruit. Don’t overdo it, but the sugar in produce is much healthier than the sugar that is put in candy and cookies in the grocery store. Vegetables and nuts are also very healthy if you want a saltier alternative.
This is especially good for folks who are trying to stay healthy because of a condition like heart disease or diabetes. You want to bring your risk factors for these diseases down, and if you are living with these conditions, you don’t want to make the effects of them worse.
Your doctor will be proud of you for choosing great snacks, and your life insurance company might give you a better price on your policy. They want to know that you are trying very hard to make lifestyle changes and live a healthier life with conditions such as these. If you eat right, your risk of dying from pre-existing conditions goes down.
Get Lots of Sleep
Sleep is just as important for the body as diet and exercise. In fact, not getting enough sleep can really throw a hitch in your plan to eat better. One of the best things you can do to maintain a healthy diet is eat three meals a day.
It can be difficult to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner on time when there’s work and other stressors to think about, and it’s even harder if you stay up late and wake up late. This creates a scenario where you only eat two meals a day, one when you get up and one at the end of the day.
If you do this, there’s a higher chance you are going to snack throughout the day to make up for that missing meal. If this does happen, make sure you plan your snacks out as we talked about above. Make them low in sugar and higher in natural ingredients.
Getting a nap in if you don’t sleep very long at night might be able to some of the benefits of sleeping eight hours, but it’s not quite the same. Try to reorganize your schedule to get sleep and it will help you maintain your healthy diet.
Don’t Smoke or Drink
Other things you consume each day besides food will also take away from the benefits of a healthy diet. Smoking nicotine cigarettes or drinking too much alcohol obviously isn’t good for you. Smoking actually suppresses your appetite, making it harder to create a diet plan because you’re never hungry.
Drinking beer is very high in calories, and they are empty calories at that. It’s important not to create habits where you are taking in calories without even thinking about them. This is a reason why soda is such a bad thing to consume. The amount of sugar in a can of Coke or Pepsi takes up so much of your daily caloric intake, but it doesn’t make you feel full.
Not smoking or drinking will also help make sure you don’t get into a drunk driving accident — for which a DUI could double your insurance rate, or more —auto insurance premium, get liver cancer from alcohol, or have lung cancer from smoking. These things are simple to avoid if you make sure you never start drinking or smoking.
Changing your diet is never easy, and the other factors that influence your diet can make it even trickier. Try to live a completely healthy life by exercising, eating right, and not forming bad habits with smoking or drinking. This will give you a chance to live a life you always desired to.
Shawn Laib writes and researches for the life insurance comparison site, QuickQuote.com. He’s passionate about wanting to help people maintain good health.
