Recipe for Healthy Living - The power of "HOW"

Welcome back to Part 3 -the last in my Recipe for Healthy Living post. Today lets look at why HOW you eat, sleep and exercise matters.

Our diet, sleep and exercise habits are more than necessities of life- they are your secret weapons for creating different energetic effects depending on HOW you use them. When you think of HOW in relation to diet, sleep and exercise the first things that might come to mind may be: "how much should I get" (quantity), "how long should I do them" (duration), or "how often should I do it" (frequency). However, there is a very important HOW that often fails to make the list; "how was I feeling before, during and after doing them".

For example, say you took the time to make a healthy lunch for yourself, but when lunch time neared you were pressed for time and ate your meal very quickly while running to your next meeting. During the meeting feelings of indigestion made it difficult to focus on what was being said. If you were to stop and reflect on this situation and correlate how feeling "hurried/rushed" while eating lead to feelings of indigestion afterwards you might be persuaded to avoid scarfing down your food quickly in the future. With this scenario, even though the food was healthy and eaten at a reasonable time, HOW you were feeling before, and while you ate influenced HOW you felt afterwards.

Paying attention to HOW you feel before, during and after your daily eating, sleep and exercise practices is like the "secret sauce" in our healthy living recipe. Eating too quickly, exercising too intensely, or feeling stressed before bedtime are a few examples of HOW your mindset can sabotage your healthy lifestyle efforts. But the only way to know the impact they have is to pause and periodically check in with yourself and see. Growing your awareness of not only HOW your eating sleep and exercise habits make you feel, but also HOW you feel before and during is a set of skills that is well worth your time and effort.

There you have it. By focusing equally on WHAT, WHEN and HOW you eat, sleep and exercise you not only increase your chance of success with your healthy living recipe but also develop a simple process for making sure your daily habits are working for and not against you.

Daily Challenge: Start a habit of periodically checking in with yourself before, during and after eating, sleeping and exercising. What was your mindset prior to doing them- was it calm and relaxed? While doing them did you feel rushed, angry or upset? Afterwards did the activity improve your physical, mental or spiritual state or did it deplete or drain you? Adjusting your daily habits in a way that is most balancing and leaves you feeling healthy and happy more times than not is the key to healthy balanced living.

Cheryl Block, Director & Founder of Healthy Inputs is a Holistic Health Nurse, Ayurvedic Practitioner & Yoga Teacher that offers healthy lifestyle consults, counseling and coaching to help people optimize their health & well-being