Extracurricular activities are super important for curating a healthy lifestyle. This is me rowing at Youth Nationals at Nathan Benderson Park in Sarasota, FL. (Photo contributed by Row2k).
Everyone wants to live a healthy lifestyle; the perfect Pinterest girl who drinks matcha, does pilates on Sunday mornings and eats sweet potatoes for dinner. However, very few people actually have the discipline to get there. Social media has a way of marketing a healthy lifestyle as an easy one. What people don’t see is the major discipline, consistency and hard work it requires. While many social media influencers can put up a facade online, a true healthy lifestyle is lived off screen.
At Staples, I noticed that instant gratification runs rampant; people want results in the short run. The truth is, to have a truly healthy lifestyle in wellness you need to be patient. It takes years to build up good habits and knock down the ones that were holding you back. There’s countless videos on social media with titles “Get Abs in 14 days!” Teens will fall into the trap and complete the 14 day challenge and not see results. Which ends up with them quitting because they think a fitness lifestyle is impossible.
Societal standards are to fit into the clean girl or fitness aesthetic, however true hard work is not an aesthetic. It’s not a trend. It’s a lifestyle that requires suffering, balance and mental toughness. It’s not all glamorous and easy as social media makes it seem.
Before I started rowing, I was extremely lazy. It took me months to build up enough motivation to go on a run or eat a healthy meal. During that time in my life, I always wanted to change but I never had enough incentive to do it. I was too impatient to wait for long term results in how I looked and felt and relied on temporary motivation to workout or eat healthy.
Part of my problem was that I didn’t know how to workout properly. I soon realized that your extracurricular activities impact your lifestyle. I joined rowing, which is based on cardiovascular fitness, so I had no choice but to workout if I wanted to get better. I started working out one to two times a day for six days a week. Slowly, I started to notice that I gained more healthy habits. I started going to sleep earlier, eating healthy foods that fueled my body and becoming more productive. Since those healthy habits were so prevalent in my life, I noticed a huge shift in my long term results.
The fact that I didn’t see results in the way I looked and felt until six months after rowing shows how patient you need to be. That’s six months of intense cardio and strength training; if you are consistent with hard work then the results are inevitable. You aren’t going to see crazy results in a week, a month or even a year; it takes time.
From my journey of living a healthier lifestyle, here are 5 tips:
1 – Start small; build tiny habits that you know you can sustain for long periods of time. Once those build off each other, you will have bigger, healthier habits. Habits are the baseline to everything.
2 – It’s not all or nothing. You don’t have to go on some crazy diet or decide to run five miles everyday. Make a goal to have healthy breakfasts or go to a workout class once a week at the start.
3 – Surround yourself with habits you want to have yourself. You become who you hang around, so don’t be friends with couch potatoes.
4 – Curate your social media accounts that fuel healthy habits. Block or unfollow those fitness influencers that make you feel bad about yourself. Instead, follow accounts that give motivational quotes or healthy recipes.
5 – Consistency and discipline are key. The path to long term healthiness is not easy, but you have to sacrifice comfort and laziness today for strength and motivation tomorrow.
Sustainability is super important. You want to make sure that you start small and end big; set small goals you know you can achieve. Striving towards goals can feel hard at first,but it gets easier in the long run. Trust in the process and know that the more work you put in – the more you get out.
What’s harder? Feeling guilty that you failed at achieving yet another goal because you let laziness take over, or being disciplined enough even when you don’t feel like it to take the small steps to achieve your goal. Choose your hard.