It only takes a few bad health habits to throw you off course on your fitness journey
We usually hear what we should do to be healthier, but today we’re going to do things differently. We’re talking about five things you need to stop doing that will help you be healthier.
We put together a list of five bad habits you need to break if you want to get fit. These include weighing yourself all the time and drinking sugary sodas.
The Scale Is a Bad Health Habit #1
First rule: GET RID OF THE SCALE.
When you first start working out, you probably want to check the scale every day to see how your numbers are doing. You might want to check the scale to see if you lost that first pound after a hard Pilates class, but it’s a big no-no and a distraction when it comes to getting fit.
Your weight is only one part of your health and fitness. If you do both weight training and cardio, you will probably start to gain muscle.
Fun fact: Muscle is denser than fat and takes up less space. This means that a 3x3cm cube of muscle weighs more than a 3x3cm cube of fat. In other words, you might actually gain weight when you start losing fat and gaining muscle.
Is there a better way to keep track of your progress in breaking this bad health habit? Get your measurements or take pictures of your progress. Measurements are the best way to tell how your waist, glutes, arms, and other body parts are changing in size. Taking pictures of your progress is a great way to see how far you’ve come on your fitness journey. You see yourself every day, so you might not notice the small changes.
Take pictures and write down what you see along the way. Your future self will thank you. The most important thing is not to get too focused on your measurements and progress photos. Take no more than one picture a week and no more than one measurement a month. Only check on your photos and measurements when it’s time to do so.
Bad Health Habit #2: Bingeing on the Weekend
Your fitness and nutrition game may be strong from Monday to Thursday, but what about from Friday night to Sunday night? It’s time to stop bingeing on the weekends if you’ve gotten into the bad habit of doing so. Just a quick note: we believe in balance. In other words, you work hard and play hard, girl! But not too much of anything. The 80/20 rule is a great way to have fun without being too reckless. But if you spend the whole weekend eating junk food and cheating, we’re getting closer to the 60/40 zone.
If you binge on the weekends often, some of the choices you make on the weekends cancel out all the hard work you do during the week. Try to have no more than one or two cheat meals on the weekend, and keep working out and staying active. Health should not just be something you check off your list; it should be a change in your way of life.
Even though the weekends always seem to go by too quickly (and you have to go back to work on Monday, sigh), Friday, Saturday, and Sunday make up 43% of the week. That means that if you “give yourself the weekend” to go off track, that’s almost half of the week!
Bad Habit #3: The Negative Mental Game
The mental game is the hardest part of any health journey. You have to keep going even when you want to give up. It’s hard enough to start a fitness journey; don’t make it harder on yourself.
Don’t get caught up in the negative mental game, which is also known as bad health habit #3.
If you can’t stop scrolling through Instagram and comparing your body to other people’s, you’re guilty of habit #3.
One of the worst things you can do is compare yourself to someone else. You will lose motivation, go on an extreme binge, and either work too hard or not eat enough to the point where it is not healthy.
Health begins on the inside. That means having a positive attitude, being proud of and happy with your body and mind, and staying fit for more than just looks. A hot body and great abs are not the only things that make you healthy. Your organs, muscles, and every other part of your body needs food. Don’t forget that!
Don’t compare yourself to other people. Instead, stay positive and give yourself a pat on the back for how far you’ve come. For real.
Eating out all the time is a bad health habit.
Okay, okay, okay. We understand. It’s hard to eat clean, especially when you don’t have time to cook. If you order food every day or get takeout every day, it’s time to break that bad habit!
Even if you’re ordering “healthy” food, there’s a good chance it’s full of sodium, processed, and has some kind of preservative in it. Most of the time, you should skip the takeout and eat healthy home-cooked meals instead. Ordering in once in a while is fine, but if you do it all the time, it’s time to change things up.
Meal prep is one of the easiest ways to break this unhealthy habit. Meal prep is when you cook all of your healthy meals for the week on one day. This meal prep will last you for three to five days after you make it. You don’t have to cook or clean up after yourself; it’s as easy as ordering in. To learn how to do meal prep like a pro, read our ultimate guide for beginners.
Bad Health Habit #5: Drinking Your Calories
Goodbye daily sodas, Starbucks pumpkin spice lattes, and other things. Some of these drinks taste great, but they’re full of sugar and not good for your health. One 16oz fountain drink of Coca-Cola has 53 grams of sugar, just to give you an idea. Healthline says that the American Heart Association says that men should eat no more than 37.5 grams of added sugars per day and women should eat no more than 25 grams. K, WHOA. One fountain drink has more sugar than a woman should have in a day, and it lasts for two days! Sugar also affects your skin, so if you want that glow, you should definitely stop eating it.
If you want that fizz, drinking carbonated water is a great alternative to soda.
On the flip side, if you do have a sweet tooth and prefer getting that sugar fix, ditch the sugar for healthier sweeteners instead. Personally, I love stevia. It takes a few tries to get used to the taste, but once you do, it tastes ah-mazing in coffee, homemade lattes, and more. You can find my personal favorite type of stevia here – it’s called Truvia. And that’s how you can enjoy delicious lattes on the regular – guilt free. 😉
And if you don’t like stevia, you can try out a few other natural sweetener options like this 100% raw and unfiltered honey or Blue Agave All Purpose Sweetener.
Keep in mind that taking care of your health is a journey, not a list of things to do. There is so much more to being healthy than meeting the “ideal beauty standards” of what’s trending right now. You’ve only got one body – take good care of it, appreciate it, fuel it, and thank your body for carrying you through your entire life. <3
P.S. If you’re looking for some tips on how to stay healthy when you have no time, check out our video below!