7 tips to maintain your healthy lifestyle for more than a week

If you decide to live a healthier life, for example by exercising more or eating healthier, you will undoubtedly have to deal with setbacks. Especially when you abruptly change your lifestyle, it can be difficult to keep up. It is important to keep motivating yourself and make realistic changes, the tips below can help you with that.

1. Set short-term goals

Some people simply perform better under time pressure, and this can also be the case when you set a deadline for achieving your intended goals. If you set goals for yourself in the short term, you will also see results faster, and this is a good source of motivation. For example, if you decide to go to the gym five times a week, when you normally never get there, chances are you won’t be able to keep it up in the short term. Therefore, build up the changes in your lifestyle slowly, in order to work more gradually towards your end goal.

2. Think about what motivates you

If you’re losing the discipline to maintain your healthy lifestyle, it helps to think about the overall reason you started doing this. For example, do you want to lose a few kilos? Or improve your overall health? Write it down on paper for yourself, so you always have a reminder if you don’t like it for a while.

3. Create the right environment

If you want to create a healthy lifestyle, it is also important to remove ‘bad’ options from your immediate environment, such as a drawer filled with sweets or cookies. By making healthier options available, such as a bowl of fruit on the table, you are also more likely to make the right decisions.

4. Look at alternatives

If you eat a tub of ice cream every night, it will be more difficult to stop completely because it has become part of your habits. Much of this revolves around comfort, which is why it’s important to find a good alternative to a bad habit. That way the step is a lot smaller.

5. Reward your successes

One of the most important ways to change your behavior is by rewarding yourself. So think about what makes you happy, and treat yourself when you have achieved a goal. For example, do you see a beautiful sports outfit that you would like to order? Then wait with this until you have been to the gym for a few weeks.

6. Involve your friends and family

By involving your friends and family in your new lifestyle, they will gain understanding and admiration for this. In addition, it can also be very helpful if you have people around you who also want to live a healthier life (or are already doing so), so that you get motivation from this. If you go to the gym together, you are less likely to find an excuse ;-).

7. See every day as a new opportunity

Don’t just focus on the end result, but embrace the process you are going through. There will be days when things don’t go as planned, but if you dwell too much on failures or small successes, you’re more likely to give up hope. Start every day with a clean slate!