Five Habits and Principles for a Healthy Lifestyle

1. Plan Your Meals

Planning your meals for the week is a great recipe for success in reaching your health goals, especially when beginning. Thinking about what to eat next can be stressful, life can also get in the way and next thing you know you are opting for whatever food is easiest, most of the time not the best of choice. Cooking your own meals has the advantage of you knowing exactly what you're eating. When you cook at home with whole real foods it is an optimal way to provide your body with an abundant amount of nutrients and have it function to the best of it's potential. It is also more cost efficient.

2. Start Your Day with Something Green

Specifically a green smoothie or juice. This is one of my favorite healthy habits and one that anyone can easily adopt. Smoothies and juices can be really nutritious when you have the right ingredients and can set the tone to make better choices the rest of the day. My go to is kale, spinach, MCT oil, protein powder, and then I add 1-2 fruits I love. (usually a type of berry, banana, or pineapple)

3. Eat the Rainbow

AKA eat a variety of food and stop eating the SAME thing! Eating an abundance of colorful foods and avoiding processed foods as much as possible is probably the best habit to live by! Focusing on eating a variety of colors will increase your intake of different nutrients to benefit your health tremendously. Not to mention that this is a great recipe to have a healthy and diverse microbiome!

4. Exercise 3-5X a Week

Exercising for aesthetics is just the cherry on top of this Sunday! Exercising has too many benefits for us to not be doing this! From cardiovascular health, cognitive functions, bone health, moods, insulin resistance, energy, quality sleep, confidence…. Too many!! At the minimum 3 days a week is a good start! 

5. Ask Yourself These Three Questions

• What are the ingredients?
• Are these ingredients nutritious?
• Where do these ingredients come from?

I adopted this one from Vani Hari, the food activist and blogger "Foodbabe," and it’s truly helped so many people I've worked with. First, the goal is to eat as much whole foods as possible and limit the processed foods so we don’t even have to worry about ingredient lists, but we have to be realistic and know that processed foods are a part of our lives. So following these three questions before making the choices of what we buy and what we eat is super beneficial!

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