To achieve a healthy lifestyle you need to achieve a balanced lifestyle. And this is done by having an 80/20 mindset. Here are 3 ways you can achieve this.
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Building a healthy lifestyle means having a balanced lifestyle. The healthy habits that you do every day will not mean a thing if you are not doing the things that you enjoy or see to be ‘unhealthy’. You will get bored of building yourself a healthy lifestyle that you will end up going back to your bad and unhealthy habits. I am speaking from experience.
Before I learnt about the 80/20 rule, I always thought starting a healthy lifestyle would be so difficult and it was a ‘punishment’ for all those days that I ate unwell and didn’t exercise. This is why I hated the process and would never stay consistent with building a healthy and happy lifestyle for myself.
The only way you will ever stay consistent with anything is if you ‘marry the process, and divorce the results’. And there is no way you will enjoy the process if you are not creating a balanced lifestyle. The benefits of a balanced lifestyle are the results that you will achieve due to consistency.
Once you start to develop an 80-20 mindset, you start to enjoy the process more because you realise that you do not need to be strict with yourself to be healthy – mentally and physically. So I wanted to share with you 3 ways you can create a balanced lifestyle to help fall in love with a better lifestyle for yourself.
This post is all about 3 ways you can achieve a balanced lifestyle with an 80/20 mindset.
Balanced Lifestyle
What Is A Balanced Lifestyle And Why Is It Important?
A balanced lifestyle is when you consider all aspects of your life – your health, family, work, and mental/emotional well-being. It is so common for us to neglect certain aspects of our lives, especially ourselves. In the beginning, when I became a mother, I would constantly just focus on my daughter and neglect my physical and mental well-being. I realised after a while that this meant that I wasn’t being the best mother or wife that I could be. As they say, you can’t pour from an empty cup.
So when I started my health journey, I did it as a ‘punishment’ or a ‘chore’ and only focused on exercise and eating well. Meaning I was still neglecting other aspects of my life. This only led to a lack of consistency and I hated it so much which just made everything worse.
This is why it is so important to focus on every aspect of your life. Being healthy isn’t just losing weight and eating well. It is also enjoying family time, and working on your mental and emotional well-being. One will not work without the other.
Below I have given three examples of how you can achieve a balanced lifestyle to hopefully help you enjoy the process and not be too hard on yourself.
1. Eating Nutritional Meals
Looking after your body means feeding it nutritional meals. Check out this blog post with a week of healthy breakfast ideas to help you start your day right. But being strict with your diet can affect your consistency. Your 80 should be eating nutritional meals. However, your 20 should be having non-nutritional meals too.
When I first started, I felt like I couldn’t go out with my husband to eat out, enjoy take out or snacks during movie night or enjoy yummy ‘non-nutritional’ meals during family gatherings. Which led me to just avoid spending family time to avoid the temptations.
Do you know what this led to? I just went back to eating non-nutritional meals every day. This is why having a balanced lifestyle is so important. Once I started doing that, I started enjoying food more, enjoying family gatherings, and date nights and we even started having take-out once a week to look forward to a day full of eating food that we love.
2. Rest And Self Care
Daily movement is so important and something that we all need to be doing to keep fit and healthy. And daily movement can help with your mental well-being significantly.
But in order to achieve a balanced lifestyle you need to prioritise rest when needed as it is also important. Some days we may not be up for it because our body needs the rest. Scheduling a day of rest during the week can help you stay consistent with your schedule because you know you will have a day of rest.
Moving your body does not always need to be hardcore exercise. It can be stretching your body for 10-20 minutes. Some days I wake up and want to move my body but my body is telling me that it can’t because it is in pain, so I do a 10-minute stretch.
Scheduling self-care is a way to achieve a balanced lifestyle. I love my self-care Sundays where I am focusing on only me, where I do my night routine uninterrupted, plan the week, and read a book/listen to a podcast. This helps me ‘fill my cup’. But self-care days for me are also spending time with family. So this could be planning a day out or even just a movie night with my husband. Anything that calms me or makes me happy is self-care to me. This way you are focusing not only on your health but other aspects such as family and emotional well-being too.
Improving your physical well-being does not mean a thing when you are not focusing on other aspects of your life. Balance is everything.
Create a morning and night routine as a form of daily self-care. It has helped me significantly and I know it will help you too. Check out two of my blog posts where I have shared a positive morning routine and night routine.
3. Staying Consistent
Consistency comes from self-discipline and this comes from building good habits. However, having an 80/20 mindset means knowing that life sometimes gets in the way and you may not be able to stay consistent with your good habits because you may have to miss a day or even a week! Just know that it is ok.
I remember I would get so stressed about this and think I missed a day/week what’s the point of carrying on? This just resulted in my inconsistency with my healthy habits and I stopped for months. But once I achieved that 80/20 mindset, I achieved a healthy balanced lifestyle, where I am building a healthy lifestyle but at the same time I know that sometimes life can get in the way.
I hope you found this valuable and given you an understanding of a balanced lifestyle and the importance of it.
Make sure to follow me on Instagram and TikTok for more healthy lifestyle inspiration!
Lots of love, Mariam x
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This post was all about how to achieve a balanced lifestyle with an 80/20 mindset.
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