From candy jars on your co-worker’s desk to the prevalence of convenience foods that cater to our busy lifestyles, from missed workouts and lack of sleep due to juggling stressful situations to happy hour cocktails, bad health habits are easy to come by. Each one by itself isn’t so bad, but when they pile on top of each other, you quickly can find yourself in a vicious cycle of unhealthy habits. The problem with bad health habits is that they’re easy to include into your lifestyle, but hard to move away from, even when you realize how much they’re costing your health and wellness.
Many people have a hard time distinguishing between their perception of living with healthy habits and the reality of their lifestyle choices. When there’s a large gap between perception and reality, that’s when your lifestyle habits can end up costing you. To help put the cost of bad habits into perspective, here are four bad health habits that many people struggle with.
Diet and Exercise
Most people understand the importance of eating healthy and exercising, but many believe they’re a lot more active and eating better than they really are. Larger portions, hidden ingredients in processed foods or when eating out at a restaurant and not properly calculating the actual impact of your activity level can be some of the leading causes to a poor diet and exercise plan. Another common cause is that people aren’t honest with themselves or others when it comes to admitting the amount and types of foods they eat regularly, as well as how often they actually skip workouts. Many people keep deluding themselves by believing that they’re really eating healthier and exercising more than they really are. It’s important to impress on people that they’re only fooling themselves when they’re caught up in their own false perceptions.
To get real about what you eat and how active you are, try incorporating food journaling and activity tracking into your routine. Even if you just track yourself for a short amount of time like a few weeks, you can unveil the reality of what you eat and how much you exercise.
Alcohol
Although there are various studies and media stories about the benefits of some alcohols like red wine, don’t fool yourself into believing that drinking is actually good for you. Alcohol isn’t a health food so you have to be honest with yourself if you choose to drink a glass of wine or a bottle of beer.
If you do enjoy a cocktail every now and again, avoid drinking at night right before heading to bed. Instead, drinking alcohol after you exercise – like having a beer after you’ve run a race – will cost you less in the long run because your body’s metabolism is at its highest levels. It will be able to burn off the extra calories quicker in a situation like this, rather than if you’re lounging on the couch having a glass of wine after sitting all day at your desk job. In any situation, though, moderation is always key.
When you drink at night, you’re compounding the increased caloric and sugar intake, as well as interrupting your sleep patterns. Alcohol may not impact your ability to go to sleep, but it will have a negative effect on the duration and quality of your sleep. All of this can negatively impact your health and fitness goals.
Sleep
Everybody thinks they can go without sleep, but really you’re only doing damage to your mental and physical health when you don’t get enough rest. The effects can be quite damaging to your long-term health and fitness, but you don’t always see them right away. One week of bad sleep can impact you drastically at the cellular level and it’s never really possible to make up for lost rest. There’s a linear relationship between the amount of sleep a person gets and their overall health and fitness levels. Studies have shown the less you sleep the higher your BMI. This is due to poor insulin control and the increase in cortisol levels. This can negatively impact your hormones, accelerate the increase in body fat and have bad effects on your health.
Stress
In our constant, always-on-the-go society, many people suffer from the negative effects of stress without even realizing it. Lack of sleep, a constant feeling of uneasiness and even physical ailments like stomachaches and headaches are common stress indicators. To help manage the daily stressors in your life, use regular physical activity as a healthy outlet, as well as taking time out for yourself away from technology, and removing the elements in your life that may be triggering your stress. When you’re chronically stressed, your health and fitness levels can definitely be compromised.
If you’re having trouble losing weight or meeting your fitness goals, you have to figure out what habits are factoring into your problem. Bad habits tend to never stand alone. They feed upon one another, creating a vicious cycle of bad habits.
Guilty pleasures and bad habits can be found around every corner in life. To minimize their impact on your health and fitness, focus on eliminating each bad habit you currently indulge in one at a time. You’ll not only start feeling better about making better life choices, but your body’s health will appreciate your new healthy perception and lifestyle.
If you don’t make the time and effort now to make healthy choices, it’s going to cost you in the long run in the form of poor health, doctor bills and not living as long as you’d like. If you spend the time, effort and money now to eat healthy, exercise and adopt good habits, then you’re setting yourself up to live a richer and longer life. It’s either do it now, or pay the price later. Ern Baxter wrote a book about his own struggles to develop healthy habits after a heart attack almost took his life. He aptly wrote:
“If your lifestyle does not control your body, eventually your body will control your lifestyle.”
Submitted by Joe Thiel with Fitness Together.
