Healthy Lifestyle: Much More Than Exercise and Diets

A recent surge in lifestyle-related diseases like diabetes and hypertension, particularly in India, has been reported in studies published on June 7, 2023, in The Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology. This rise is attributed to factors such as sedentary lifestyle, unhealthy diet, and stress.

In a separate development, researchers from Queen Mary University of London and Barts Hospital have identified a gene variant causing a common type of hypertension linked to the hormone Aldosterone. These findings underscore the importance of a balanced lifestyle for disease prevention, and holistic healthcare comprising of components which are more than exercise and diets.

A healthy lifestyle and a balanced life are much more than regular exercise and diet patterns. It also includes how you manage your relationships, time and money. The way you remember and deals with your past affect the choices you make in present. It affects your future for sure.

To live a healthy life is to deal with all the dimensions of yourself and working on every front to create that fulfilling experience which is yearned by all the wise men on the planet. Let’s dive in and explore how we can make our lifestyle choices in a healthy, balanced and fulfilling manner.

A healthy lifestyle is about the conscious choices that make you better than what you were yesterday. We all dream and aspire to have a healthy lifestyle, we all should.

There are many other facets of our lives which we must attend in order to have a balance and a well-lived life.

We need to sing, to have a dependable friend, a loving spouse and money in bank accounts. It’s not a crime to have these dreams. Crime is to have these dreams while not doing anything to be deserving to achieve them.

In this article: ‘Healthy Lifestyle: Much More Than Exercise and Diets‘, we’ll see that life is not just a brand of perfume and how many miles on treadmill. It is way more than that.

Clothing and interior designing and car brands are a page in the book of life. But the book of life has many pages in which you have to write your own story and complete it in the most stylish manner, that should make you happy and satisfied in the end.

10 Tips for a Healthy Lifestyle: A Fulfilling and Balanced Approach

1. Under-Promise and Over-Deliver

It is disappointment in expectations that hurt and not the actual failures. People have the habit to commit very high when they are happy and when it comes to delivering, then there is a huge setback. It destroys relations, trust, friendship and credibility. And under the pressure to meet unreasonably rosy promises you made to your spouse, friends, boss, colleagues etc. you end up inviting a lot of stress in your life.

It is not just your fault or not that you are born with some software glitches in your mind. It is human nature. Even you have been the recipient of such things, where people have promised you the stars and failed to deliver even an LED Bulb. You were not hurt for not getting those promised stars, but the promises that were broken, the expectations, your trust and your belief in other people were hurt.

People love surprises and get delighted when they get more than they have expected. That’s why I have said, ‘under-promise’ i.e. promise less or average than you can actually deliver. It will be like a safety cushion. In case, there is un-accounted adversity and you are able to deliver less than your capacity, even then your credibility is protected. And if things go normal and you can really deliver better, then surely the other person will be happy and in-return your life will be stress-free.

It though looks like a simple hack or manipulation, but I suggest, it is harmless, just give it a try and come back to thank me. A healthy and fulfilled life is about how you see yourself. Are you a man/ woman of your words? Are you a credible and trusting person? What matters most is your own opinion about yourself. Standup to yourself, for yourself.

2. Managing Relationship

Not manipulating relationships. All I am emphasizing is managing your relationships. It is not wrong to yearn for social meets, friendships, outings, family time etc. Homo sapiens by default are social animals and the society in most of the ways is contributing to our survival and learning as we are also an important cog in the machinery of society.

But things get messy when you mess up with your priorities. Every human is important, but not every human is ‘that important’. You need to identify negative people in your circle. People who are pessimists, narcissists etc. You need to understand that you cannot train and change other human beings. That you are not God. Let people be what they are. Don’t try to manage, remote-control or improve people. Manage how you interact with them.

Give priority to your family, loved ones etc. Identify people who treat you as a time pass. It is your life, take a bold decision and leave them. Nurture your children, parents, value your spouse and spend quality time with them. If there are any issues, talk with an intention to solve them instead of lecturing people. Understand the problems and issues these important people in your life are facing. Why are they not able to cope up as per their perspective. Just understand, don’t lecture. It is their domain to solve those issues, but you can provide a valuable moral and emotional support.

Invest in your relations wisely. Choose your friends in a highly selective manner. At such a mature age, you have all the wisdom in yourself to decide which friends you want to keep and which ones to ‘let go’. Have quality time for loved ones. Don’t try to play God. Just be human. Live a healthy life and get surrounded by people who add to your life in a positive sense and be a gem for others too.

“Whoever is happy will make others happy too.”

Anne Frank

3. Take a Break! It’s OKAY

Life is for doers. The man of action can accomplish what a man of the dream can only wish about. You are on the right path to your dreams. Surely, nothing comes for free. We have to pay for everything. If you are a salaried employee, you pay with your freedom and independence to work. If you are a businessman, you sacrifice the warm comfort of regular salaried cashflows at month’s end. If you watch Netflix, it’s not just about the monthly subscription, you also pay with ‘not working on your dreams’ while you are watching that addictive series.

But does that translates to being a work-horse? No, never. Last I have checked, you were a human and not an animal. So, let’s advance on this assumption. You have multiple dimensions to yourself. Like creative, spiritual, aesthetic, religious etc. Working hard is fine. But taking a break to nurture other parts of your personality is essential. Work is a part of your human existence and not the whole itself.

But taking a regular break is a part of working itself. Why? Simply put, recharging yourself and saving from burning-out too quick. Additionally, you also need to develop other facets of your personality in order to complete yourself. The moment you upgrade yourself fully, your inputs in all the tasks also gets a quality upgrade automatically. And yes, that old adage is true,’ sharpen your axe’. Also, you need to review your progress, chart your journey and do course corrections. For that, you need to take breaks. ‘Taking Break’, here does not mean wasting time, it means reviewing your tasks, grooming your personality, connecting to your inner and spiritual self. Take a break to get connected to yourself and you’ll find a healthy lifestyle in itself will unfold as you would be more than prepared for it.

4. Accept Your Past: Healthy Lifestyle is Possible Only When You Overcome the Guilt From the Past

Living in the past results in guilt, while living in future gives you anxiety. Living in present is the most difficult task, which looks like a piece of cake to every walking mortal on the planet. Even while listening to your favourite music track, you slip into analysing something which is not affecting you in real sense. Focussing on what you are doing, though requires you to be in present, no one tells you how to remain in present? I’ll take the risk of answering that. The answer is to make peace with your past. Nope, don’t forget or dump it, that will be a blunder all together.

Making peace with your past is to accept your faults as your own instead of blaming some outside source. You can only blame an outside person only if you were walking on the pavement and drunk driver rammed his car into you. Otherwise, you should accept it as your doing. Why? Well, here is the catch. I do it with me. If I take the responsibility of past, the I alone have the power to correct my mistake thus changing the state in which I am living currently. If I am owning my mistakes, then I do have the power to correct them and can take a lesson from them, so that history does not repeat itself. If all the mistakes were done by others and you were the victim, then how can you improve yourself and grow? Think about it!

People want to live a healthy life and a balanced life, but balance lies in the present, you can’t tip the scales either to past or to the future. Take measure wisely.

5. Build For the Future

Living for a Friday night party or living from week to week basis is a very short span to waste the talent which you command. Building your future is not anything related to daydreaming. It is strictly related to what you are and what you choose to do about it. To build your future, you need to live in the present and deliberately do the calculated tasks in such a manner so that you can have your desired results. Your current actions and tasks will be the seeds from which the fruit of the future will ripe. Better sow the seeds right and take care of them.

Having no goals and cliche dialogues like ‘you only live once’, have done more damage than being helpful. People say, ‘you only live once’ to avoid responsibility, but never say, ‘you only live once’ to say, let me build a legacy, do something good, make something valuable because this life is the only chance I have. It has become an anthem and an excuse of losers for not doing any work, then not getting any result and then finally protesting against the government, society, patriarchy and many more.

Build your legacy, build your life, make a change and make a substantial one. If you love nature, go plant the trees, if you love gaming, be the biggest gamer. If you love dancing, love as many styles you want. Who knows what holds in future, but you know what you hold in present.

“The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.”

Walt Disney

6. Control Your Social Media Surfing

Social media is not a demon. But it is no less than a satan. Beware! not of the social media but yourself. Many social media websites and applications are designed in a psychological framework to get you addicted to it. You talk less to the person sitting beside you and more to the person on the screen of your gadget. If affect you in more ways than you can imagine. Being social is a part of human nature. You need to talk to people in person. I am not against technology, but I am much in favour of human welfare. Technology is to serve us not to make us subservient.

Use social media when it serves your purpose. Link to friends and relatives who lives too far away and see their updates. But what is the point of talking to a friend on some friendship app who lives just two blocks away? Rather go out, meet up, chat up and catch up. See the beautiful sunset from your own eyes, instead of through the camera lens. Your experience matters the most.

7. Work on Your Personality

8. Diet: Watch What You Eat

Stay healthy. Don’t starve. Staying healthy does not mean to look like a model of some extravagant fashion show. Fads come and fad goes. The high-carb, low-carb, keto diet, really! You need to get fit to have that favourite dress fit perfect and have your jacket sits sexy on your body. I get that. But don’t try to fit into the drawing notebook of a fashion designer. Understand what health is to get a healthy lifestyle.

A healthy lifestyle when it comes to your body is to have a bodyweight at which you feel energetic to work. Where you don’t feel tired all day and is more than just functional. Pumping up muscles and losing fat is not a strait-jacket formula. Nature is no fool and fat is there for some purpose. Eat healthily and eat a variety. Balanced food for one person could be poison for another. An old man’s diet is never recommended for an energy-hungry body of a teenager. Take advice from a medically certified nutritionist, but never from a gym instructor, who has a sales target to sell protein-supplements and uses his body as an advertisement. You have brains, use them, it’ll help. Really.

Listen to your body first. It tells you much more than what another human being on the planet can tell you about. Stay hydrated and learn what right water quantity in your body can do for you. It is a medicine in itself. Eat a variety of food to have a healthy diet. I will not say don’t drink tea or coffee, but yes, minimize its consumption. But seriously, don’t drink sweet carbonated drinks, it messes up with your sugar levels too much. Follow the diet which makes you feel energetic. Eventually, you’ll see things shaping up.

9. Fitness: Sweat it Out Sexy

I like to move it move it. You better start liking it too, because your body also likes it. So don’t be a spoil-sport. The human body is not made to sit endlessly and stare at computer screens while moving our fingers in a controlled manner. Mother nature has made us much more capable than that. I understand that we are no more a caveman, but rest assured our body needs its share of adventures. Maybe a brisk walk or a jogging session.

Exercise has innumerable benefits. Apart from looking good and sexy, it surely boosts your immune system and also helps in brain functions. A fit body has a fit mind, which is capable enough to help you achieve your dreams. What the body does mind believes. Set a target of running a mile, if it looks difficult, good, run and achieve it. You will see that a mere running activity and achieving a target led to a strong will power, which will resonate in other areas of your life. Rest you know all about losing cholesterol and pumping your heart enough to keep those hormones level deliver their optimum results. Not to forget, the glow on face and those red cheeks from regular blood flow. Yes, be it fashion, body or mind power, exercise is good and must for a healthy living, rather a stylish living.

10. Time Management is Must for a Healthy Lifestyle

Thus in this article: ‘Healthy Lifestyle: Much More Than Exercise and Diets‘, we saw that life itself has many dimensions. It’s good that you are working on a few, all you need is to keep expanding your horizons. A healthy lifestyle is not just a fancy curtain or a body-ratios. It is about living your life in the most fulfilling manner according to your own beliefs and preferences. At the same time being socially acceptable and not going broke. The aim is not just to live, but to live well.

RAJAT JHINGAN