Growing a Herb Garden on your windowsill is one way to germinate Healthy Habits

Healthy Habits step-by-step

Scheduling little acts of good behaviour, helps you step-by-step towards a healthy lifestyle.

It can be difficult to stick with the challenge of a new exercise programme. You get an advantage if you compliment this good behaviour (activity) with other healthy habits – which can be anything from choosing to snack on nuts and seeds; to drinking more water; to cooking a post-workout meal. And the more healthy choices you can cluster together, the easier you’ll find fitness success, as the individual acts of good behaviour tend to support the entire framework.

Clustering

An article in an edition of Circulation – the Journal of the American Heart Association – concerns a study of 18,000 patients from 41 countries who were encouraged to adopt 3 forms of good behaviour at the same time: to exercise, eat healthily and stop smoking. The findings showed that “good lifestyle behaviours appear to cluster”. It was the attempt to adopt all 3 behaviours simultaneously which increased success, simply because these behaviours had company.

A day of good behaviour

To kick-off healthy habits, I encourage all Muddy Plimsolls personal training clients to consider the day(s) that they exercise, as a day of overall good behaviour. A day when they consider a healthy eating diet and schedule general goodness into their daily routine, in whatever way they can. Once these healthy habits are established and feel natural, we extend the project to other days of the week, including non-exercise days.

Ripple Effect

There’s a ripple effect, as the impact of gradually adopting all these good behaviours has far-reaching possibilities.