There are no magic pills in fitness. There are no secret techniques you can use to avoid the need for diet and exercise.
However, there are some things you can do that produce disproportionate results. Each of the following habits is easy to follow and will significantly improve your health, body composition, and/or energy levels. They are not magic pills, but they do give a great return on your effort.
Keep hydrated
Dehydration can cause overeating, mood swings, lethargy, and brain fog, and most people are mildly dehydrated most of the day. To avoid this, drink a glass of water when you wake up, every 2 hours throughout the day, and before each meal.
Get moving after meals:
When you eat, your blood sugar level rises. And in response to this spike in blood sugar, your body produces insulin, which lowers blood sugar by pushing it into your body’s tissues. Unfortunately, some of that sugar goes into fat tissue, and insulin also has a depressant effect, lowering energy levels.
Fortunately, you can substantially reduce the post-meal insulin spike simply by moving around a bit after meals, which causes muscle tissue to absorb some of that sugar before the insulin response fully kicks in. walk or spend two minutes alternating sets of squats and push-ups.
keep your kitchen clean
One of the most important habits you can develop to stay fit and healthy is the habit of cooking at home. However, psychologically, this is sometimes easier said than done, so it helps remove all the barriers that prevent you from cooking at home.
Having a dirty kitchen is one of the biggest barriers that stop people from cooking, as it is really hard to get motivated to cook when the kitchen is dirty or messy.
Meditate for two minutes a day.
Meditation has a wide variety of physical and mental benefits, from stress reduction, and better sleep, to improvements in immune and cardiovascular health.
Where people go wrong, though, is when they try too hard to the point where it becomes frustrating. Unlike physical exercise, meditation ceases to be useful when it becomes unpleasant.
Take a quick photo of everything you eat
Before each meal, take a quick photo of the food with your smartphone. It makes you pause briefly and reflect on what you’re about to eat, and perhaps make healthier food choices.
For added impact, you can also post these photos on Facebook, which puts some social pressure on you to be seen eating healthy.
Ice yourself every night
Every night, hold an ice pack to your neck, upper chest, or upper back for 20 minutes. This stimulates the activity of brown adipose tissue, adipose tissue that burns energy to keep you warm.
Increasing brown adipose tissue will help you burn more calories while increasing insulin sensitivity by concentrating glucose in white adipose tissue (normal adipose tissue that only stores energy).
Perform a wake-up workout
Every morning, right after you get out of bed, do a short bodyweight workout. The following is an example of what this training should look like:
- Pistol squats, 8 reps with each leg
- Push-ups, 10 reps
- jumps, 20 reps
- Plank, 30 seconds
- Manual lunges, 8 reps
- Pike pushups, 6 reps
- Jump squat, 8 reps
Repeat this circuit 3 times, with no more than 30 seconds of rest between circuits and no rest between individual exercises. The whole thing should take about five minutes.
Choose two of these habits to focus on implementation; don’t try to work on all eight at once. Spend at least a week doing these two things consistently, every day.
Once you’ve followed these habits so consistently that they no longer require significant effort, pick two more to get to work. That way, you can implement all seven within a month or so, keeping it easy enough to stay consistent with each one.
