Reflect on your daily habits in exercise, nutrition, sleep and stress management. Photo / 123RF
Reflect on your daily habits in exercise, nutrition, sleep and stress management. Photo / 123RF
In the next instalment of our 2024 Transformation series, Kiwi personal trainer Samantha Bluemel looks back on the big changes made in 10 short weeks.
Over the last 10 weeks, we’ve explored some of the many facets that make up a balanced and healthy lifestyle, alongwith tools that can help create positive changes to your personal wellbeing. This kind of change can be challenging. We are, after all, ultimately creatures of habit. But it is also entirely possible, by breaking things down into daily, manageable steps.
Here’s a reminder of the strategies that can help you on your journey. If you missed any of the previous columns in the series, scroll to the bottom of the page for links.
Personal trainer Samantha Bluemel shares tips on how to optimize daily habits in exercise, nutrition, sleep, and stress management.
Taking the time to reflect on your unique lifestyle gently is a helpful way to transition into a new season of prioritised health and wellbeing. By acknowledging where you’re at and how you feel currently, you can begin to identify your personal start line.
If you’re aiming to make some positive changes to your lifestyle, pause first and consider the habits that currently make up these four areas:
And then start to acknowledge the room for improvement you have within each of these. This is not an exercise in beating yourself up. Instead, it’s a way to take note of where you’re at now, and identify realistic steps you can take in a new direction.
Small daily habits lead to long-term success
Instead of tearing off on a mission to become a beacon of wellbeing virtue overnight, pause. Goals that take such an extreme approach often fail as they’re too far outside the usual pattern of your life. Instead, think about how your long-term objectives break down into small daily systems.
For example, if your goal is to improve your diet and reduce your body fat percentage, pre-prepared (home-cooked) work snacks and lunches are going to go a long way. Try reserving a couple of hours each Sunday to shop for groceries and prepare some easy meals for your week ahead. On your way out the door each morning, pop these in your bag to enjoy at the office.
When it comes to creating a balanced approach to nutrition, there’s not much conventional wisdom doesn’t have an answer for. Avoid the micro-assessment of every tiny morsel that passes your lips, and consider how the following can be implemented into your lifestyle:
A general awareness of your energy in/energy out balance (how many calories should you loosely aim for based on your daily energy levels?);
Everything in moderation (80/20 is a good rule of thumb);
Consider your gut health (eat something fermented once a day);
Meal planning.
By touching on all of the above, it’s possible to create a nutritional lifestyle that doesn’t feel restrictive, micro-managed or impossible to stick to long-term. Just take things slowly and implement one new concept at a time. Let that become a habit before you add the next step. There’s no need to rush into changes that will ideally stick around for the rest of your life.
A balanced diet involves eating "the rainbow" for optimal nutrition. Photo / 123RF
Fitness for beginners
Fitness comes in so many different shapes and sizes that I’m absolutely positive there is an approach to exercise that will suit you. Sometimes it just takes a little trial and error to find it, but I promise, the effort is well worth it.
If you’re new to working out, here are a few things to consider to help you get started and stick to a new fitness habit:
Where are you starting from; how much experience do you have?
What do you enjoy? Find a form of exercise that you enjoy enough to repeat again and again. This could be anything from walking to water aerobics - the options are nearly endless.
Factor in both cardio and strength training for a well-rounded approach to muscle, lung and heart health.
Ensure you recover and rest appropriately between workouts.
Plan for the long haul
As hard as it is to plan for a far-off future, our long-term quality of life is arguably the most important reason to commit to a healthy lifestyle. We know eating a nutritionally balanced diet, exercising regularly, managing our stress levels and getting good-quality sleep collectively reduce the risk of chronic disease, and more tangibly, help us to enjoy our days and the activities that bring us fulfilment with relative ease long into the future.
Thinking about this older version of yourself can be a helpful exercise in increasing your motivation to look after your health here and now. It’s not something to dwell on all day every day, but a good way to check in with yourself when considering the changes you’d like to make to your lifestyle. Add these observations to your “why”, and when things like exercise and eating well start to feel challenging, reflect back to renew your commitment to yourself.
Weekly meal planning can simplify nutrition and reduce stress. Photo / 123RF
Legitimately helpful tech
Health and wellbeing technology can be a fun and genuinely helpful tool when used to support your wellbeing goals. For me, it’s all about a good-quality wearable, like a smart-watch or fitness tracker, that can track certain aspects of my health and keep me working towards weekly improvements. For you, it might be a virtual-reality headset and fully immersive workout, or a hand-held meditation coach designed to centre your attention inwards.
Just make sure to do your research before investing, as these products are more often than not very expensive additions. Think about how your chosen new-age tech gadget is actually solving a need in your current lifestyle, and not just fuelling a pipe dream.
Wearable health tech can gamify fitness routines for added fun. Photo / 123rf
Don’t rely on motivation alone
My final piece of advice to end this series on is this: don’t rely on motivation alone to get you to the finish line. Motivation can be an amazing catalyst for change and the perfect launching pad from which to embark on a new season. But as time goes on and life’s usual pattern resumes, that initial spark and drive will fade before the distractions of the moment.
So, how do we stick to the kind of lifestyle that results in improved health and fitness? Go back to the basics, and implement small, achievable, daily systems that slowly move you in the right direction. Build these into habits that eventually become unconscious, and you’ll soon find your entire lifestyle has aligned itself with your long-term goals.
One step at a time - you’ve got this.
Samantha Bluemel is a personal trainer and the founder of new Ponsonby fitness studio Mode, which now opens in May. Previously in this series:
