Unlock Your Best Self: The Ultimate Guide to Staying Active and Eating Healthy

We all hear the advice to work out and eat healthy, but why is it so important? Staying active and maintaining a healthy diet are two of the most impactful lifestyle choices you can make for your overall well-being. These habits offer a wide range of benefits, from weight management and disease prevention to improved mood and cognitive function. Let’s explore the profound impact of activity and healthy food on your life at every stage.

The Benefits of Physical Activity

Staying active is one of the best ways to keep our bodies healthy. Regular physical activity can relieve stress, anxiety, depression and anger. It’s like a happy pill with no side effects! Without regular activity, your body slowly loses its strength, stamina and ability to function properly. It’s like the old saying: You don’t stop moving from growing old; you grow old from stopping moving. Too much sitting and other sedentary activities can increase your risk of heart disease and stroke. It’s true - 70 is the new 60, but only if you’re healthy. Physical activity may help you live longer, and those extra years are generally healthier years! Staying active helps delay or prevent chronic illnesses and diseases associated with aging.

How Much Activity Do You Need?

The American Heart Association recommends at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity weekly. You can knock that out in just 30 minutes a day, five days a week. Move more, with more intensity, and sit less. You don’t have to make big life changes to see the benefits. To maintain or improve your health, aim for 150 minutes per week-or at least 30 minutes on all or most days of the week-of moderate physical activity. Moderate activities are ones that you can talk-but not sing-while doing, such as brisk walking or dancing. If you haven’t been active, work slowly toward the goal of 150 minutes per week. For example, start out doing light or moderate activities for shorter amounts of time throughout the week. For best results, spread out your physical activity throughout the week. Even 10 or 15 minutes at a time counts. To lose weight and keep it off, you may need to be even more active. Shoot for 300 minutes per week, or an hour a day 5 days a week. On at least 2 days per week, also try activities that strengthen your muscles.

The Ripple Effect of Exercise

The benefits of physical activity extend far beyond just physical health. Here’s a closer look at the many ways exercise can improve your life:

Weight Loss: The very best way to reliably and safely lose weight is to exercise regularly.
A Healthier Heart: Exercise is one of the biggest factors affecting your risk for heart disease.
Better Cholesterol: Exercise helps improve the balance of cholesterol in your body.
Resisting the Effects of Aging: Diet and exercise can help keep you looking and feeling youthful, both directly and indirectly.
A Stronger Immune System:
Better Mood: Exercise directly affects your mood.
Better Sexual Function: Exercise plays an important role in releasing hormones that increase the sex drive.
Less Stress:
Bragging Points:
Improved Cognitive Function: Some benefits of physical activity for brain health happen right after a session of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity. Benefits include improved thinking or cognition. Regular physical activity can help keep your thinking, learning, and judgment skills sharp as you age.
Disease Prevention: Getting at least 150 minutes a week of moderate physical activity can put you at a lower risk for heart disease and stroke. You can reduce your risk even further with more physical activity. Regular physical activity can reduce your risk of developing type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome. Physical activity may help reduce the risk of serious outcomes from infectious diseases, including COVID-19, the flu, and pneumonia. Being physically active lowers your risk for developing several common cancers.
Stronger Bones and Muscles: As you age, it's important to protect your bones, joints, and muscles. Lifting weights is an example of a muscle-strengthening activity. Muscle strengthening is important for older adults who experience reduced muscle mass and muscle strength with aging.
Improved Physical Function: Everyday activities include climbing stairs, grocery shopping, or cleaning the house. Being unable to perform everyday activities is called functional limitation. For older adults, doing a variety of physical activities improves physical function and decreases the risk of falls or injury from a fall. Older adults need to include aerobic, muscle strengthening, and balance activities in their physical activity routines. Hip fracture is a serious health condition that can result from a fall. Breaking a hip can have life-changing negative effects, especially if you're an older adult.
Increased Lifespan: adults ages 40 and older increased their moderate-to-vigorous physical activity. Taking more steps a day also helps lower the risk of premature death from all causes. In one study, for adults younger than 60, the risk of premature death leveled off at about 8,000 to 10,000 steps per day.

Making Activity a Part of Your Life

Becoming more active isn’t easy. Different people may have different reasons for finding it hard to get moving. Try sneaking a few minutes of physical activity at a time into your day. Take regular breaks from sitting at the computer or watching TV. Get up, move, and stretch by lifting your hands over your head. Some people may be put off by physical activity, especially if they haven’t been active for a while or got hurt and are afraid of getting injured again. Try being active with your kids-walk, jump rope, play flag football or tag, or toss a softball. Get a friend or family member to go biking or take a dance class with you.

Most people don’t need to see a health care professional before starting a less intense physical activity, like walking.

The Power of Healthy Food

A healthy diet is essential for good health and nutrition. It protects you against many chronic noncommunicable diseases, such as heart disease, diabetes and cancer. Eating a variety of foods and consuming less salt, sugars and saturated and industrially-produced trans-fats, are essential for healthy diet.

Building a Healthy Plate

A healthy diet comprises a combination of different foods. These include:

Staples like cereals (wheat, barley, rye, maize or rice) or starchy tubers or roots (potato, yam, taro or cassava).
Legumes (lentils and beans).
Fruit and vegetables.
Foods from animal sources (meat, fish, eggs and milk).

Key Principles for a Healthy Diet

Here is some useful information, based on WHO recommendations, to follow a healthy diet, and the benefits of doing so.

Breastfeed babies and young children: A healthy diet starts early in life - breastfeeding fosters healthy growth, and may have longer-term health benefits, like reducing the risk of becoming overweight or obese and developing noncommunicable diseases later in life. Feeding babies exclusively with breast milk from birth to 6 months of life is important for a healthy diet. It is also important to introduce a variety of safe and nutritious complementary foods at 6 months of age, while continuing to breastfeed until your child is two years old and beyond.
Eat plenty of vegetables and fruit: They are important sources of vitamins, minerals, dietary fibre, plant protein and antioxidants. People with diets rich in vegetables and fruit have a significantly lower risk of obesity, heart disease, stroke, diabetes and certain types of cancer.
Eat less fat: Fats and oils and concentrated sources of energy. Eating too much, particularly the wrong kinds of fat, like saturated and industrially-produced trans-fat, can increase the risk of heart disease and stroke. Using unsaturated vegetable oils (olive, soy, sunflower or corn oil) rather than animal fats or oils high in saturated fats (butter, ghee, lard, coconut and palm oil) will help consume healthier fats. To avoid unhealthy weight gain, consumption of total fat should not exceed 30% of a person's overall energy intake.
Limit intake of sugars: For a healthy diet, sugars should represent less than 10% of your total energy intake.

Healthy Eating for Children

Every child needs to learn the ABCs of life. What are the benefits of good nutrition and exercise for kids? Good nutrition is essential to healthy brain development in children which is, of course, critical to learning. Lack of access to healthy, wholesome foods and inadequate physical activity contributes to kids becoming overweight and not getting adequate nutrition for their growth and development. Unhealthy weight control behaviors have been found to co-occur with obesity. Food advertising targeted at children is dominated by commercials for unhealthy food (e.g., candy, sugary cereals, sugary beverages, processed snack foods, fast food restaurants). Risks to academic achievement - result from children not getting adequate nutrition and physical activity. Stigma of being overweight - can lead to social and psychological distress (e.g., depression, low self esteem). Overabundance of unhealthy foods - there are a growing number of communities called “food deserts” where supermarkets and grocery stores are scarce or charge higher prices for healthy foods than processed foods.

Read also: Healthy Eating on the Run

Children are instinctively primed to imitate their parents and caregivers. They are incredibly sensitive to the messages that are sent about eating and exercise. Parents and caregivers significantly influence the likes and dislikes that children attach to certain foods. These influences can last a lifetime. Each of us can probably remember a favorite home cooked meal from our childhood. There is even research that suggests that this begins in infancy; children who are breastfed may be exposed to different flavors in their mother’s breast milk than the sugars and fats in infant formula.

Role model: Make sure to eat healthy, wholesome foods and get plenty of exercise yourself. Be consistent; this should be a permanent part of your lifestyle.
Advocate: use your voice to push for positive changes in child care, schools and your communities that facilitate healthy eating and exercise.
Use healthy, wholesome foods (i.e., fruits, vegetables, whole grains, lean proteins, and low-fat dairy) that are nutrient-dense when cooking family meals or preparing snacks.
Go foods: low in fat, sugar and calories and nutrient-dense, e.g., fruits and vegetables.
Slow foods: higher in fat, added sugar and calories, e.g., white bread, pancakes, fruit canned in syrup.
Whoa foods: very high in fat, added sugar and calories while low in nutrients, e.g., candy, soda, French fries.
Beverages: e.g., plenty of water, low or non-fat milk, fresh juice, tea.

Practical Tips for Healthy Eating

To set yourself up for healthy eating success, keep things simple. Eating healthier doesn’t have to be complicated. Eating foods that are good for you and staying physically active may help you reach and maintain a healthy weight and improve how you feel. An example of a healthy meal includes vegetables, fruits, and small portions of protein and whole grains. These foods provide fiber and important nutrients such as vitamins and minerals. Treats are okay if you have them once in a while. Just don’t eat foods such as candy, ice cream, or cookies every day. Limit sweet treats to special occasions, and keep portions small. If you can’t have milk or milk products because you have trouble digesting lactose, the sugar found in milk, try lactose-free milk or yogurt. Besides milk and milk products, you can get calcium from calcium-added cereals, juices, and drinks made from soy or nuts.

Eating healthy foods may seem hard when you don’t have time to cook or are on a tight budget. Eating healthy doesn’t have to take a lot of time. Nor do you need to be a chef to prepare healthy meals. Buy frozen or precut veggies and add them to a salad or veggie wrap with pita bread for a quick meal. When you cook, make enough for extra meals. Casseroles with veggies and whole grains, and a whole cooked chicken, may last a few days so you don’t have to cook another meal every day. If you don’t feel comfortable cooking, try something easy, like combining your favorite fresh, frozen, or canned veggies to make a stir-fry. Avoid buying single portions of snacks, yogurt, and other foods, which costs more. Check newspaper ads for food sales. Try canned beans such as black, butter, kidney, pinto, and others. Avoid heavy gravies, salad dressings, or sauces. Try to avoid fried foods and fast food.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Nutrition Facts label appears on most packaged foods and tells you how many calories and servings are in a box, can, or package. The label also shows how many nutrients are in one food serving.

The Dangers of Inactivity

Being a “couch potato” may be harmful even for people who get regular exercise. The precise amount of exercise needed to achieve or maintain a healthy weight varies based on a person’s diet and genes. How much exercise do you need? Physical activity guidelines-including strength training and flexibility training-explain how much you should be moving. Physical activity can also help people maintain weight loss. Among the nearly 3,700 men and women who are part of the National Weight Control Registry, a group that includes only people who lost more than 30 pounds and kept them off for at least a year, the average participant burns an average of about 400 calories per day in physical activity. That’s the equivalent of about 60 to 75 minutes of brisk walking each day, or 35 to 40 minutes of daily jogging. Only about 30 percent of adult Americans report they get regular physical activity during their leisure time-and about 40 percent of Americans say they get no leisure-time physical activity at all. The Nurses’ Health Study found a strong link between television watching and obesity. Researchers followed more than 50,000 middle-aged women for six years, surveying their diet and activity habits. Findings showed that for every two hours the women spent watching television each day, they had a 23 percent higher risk of becoming obese and 14 percent higher risk of developing diabetes. It didn’t matter if the women were avid exercisers: The more television they watched, the more likely they were to gain weight or develop diabetes, regardless of how much leisure-time activity and walking they did. Researchers at Tokyo Medical University found an association between spending less time watching television and a lower risk of overweight and obesity in older adults, regardless of whether participants met physical activity guidelines. The study followed 1,806 participants between the ages of 65 and 74. Participants were put into one of four categories based on television viewing time. The less time spent watching television, the lower the participants’ risk of becoming overweight or obese. Another study analyzed the global effect of inactivity on the increase of diseases. The researchers estimated that physical inactivity accounts for 6% of the burden of heart disease, 7% of type 2 diabetes, 10% of breast cancer, and 10% of colon cancer. Inactivity also causes 9% of premature mortality. These staggering statistics put the true dangers associated with inactivity into a global perspective. More recently, studies have found that people who spend more time each day watching television, sitting, or riding in cars have a greater chance of dying early than people who are more active. Researchers speculate that sitting for many hours may change peoples’ metabolism in ways that promote obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and other chronic conditions. It is also possible that sitting is a marker for a broader sedentary lifestyle. Furthermore, staying active does not mitigate the harmful effects of sit time.

Read also: Mobile Dining Revolution

Staying Motivated and Seeking Support

But improving your health isn’t the only reason to move more and eat better. Your family, friends, and coworkers can be a great source of support as you work to adopt healthier habits. Ask them to join your efforts. Being healthy is important for them, too. Whether you are a seasoned health advocate or just now committing to taking the first steps in becoming more healthy, share your progress and inspire your friends and family to do the same.

Set specific goals and move at your own pace to reach them. For example, instead of “I’ll be more active,” set a goal such as “I’ll take a walk after lunch at least 2 days a week.” Ask your family, friends, and coworkers to help you. No matter what, keep trying.

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