Spring clean your fitness and health

Posted on 5 September, 2018

In an ideal world, we’d be maintaining a healthy diet and exercise regime all year round.

In the real world, it’s often not that simple. Whether you’ve been hit hard by the Canberra winter, or swept away on an exotic adventure overseas (you lucky thing), many of us find that by the time spring rolls around, we’re a little worse for wear.

Spring is the perfect time to give your fitness and nutrition approach an overhaul – we spring clean our homes, why not our bodies? I’m not talking about detoxing or doing a juice cleanse but putting some sensible strategies in place to make a positive change in your long-term health.

Here are some ideas to get you started:

Eat more vegetables

It’s probably the least sexy piece of health advice out there, but also one of the best. Yes, vegetables are choc-full of nutrients to keep you healthy, but there are so many more reasons to eat them.

For starters, they give you far more bang for your buck in terms of volume. For example, think of 100 grams of baby spinach leaves compared to 100 grams of hot chips. The baby spinach leaves are going to fill up your stomach and provide more nutrients and fibre than the chips.

There are so many different vegetables out there to explore and so many delicious ways to prepare them. Make the experience exciting by heading out to the local markets and picking the produce that appeal to you most, then getting creative with how you prepare them. Look to cookbooks for inspiration or try these tips.

Track your steps

I’m a huge advocate of planned exercise like gym workouts. That being said, spending an hour at the gym is not for everyone, and also doesn’t offset 15 hours of sitting on your butt.  Making sure that you’re regularly moving throughout the day makes a huge difference to your overall activity levels – not to mention your energy. It’s also worth remembering that if you’re trying to lose weight by eating less calories, your activity levels can easily plummet, in part offsetting your weight loss efforts.

Many of us don’t actually realise how sedentary we are. Wearing some kind of fitness tracker (like a Garmin, FitBit or Apple Watch) means that you can track how many steps you take in a day, and then take action to be moving more.

If you need an extra push, it’s not too late to join Steptember!

Switch up your fitness

If you find that you’re not enjoying your current fitness regime, now is the time to change it. This can be as small as updating your gym program with different exercises, or as drastic as taking up a completely new and different activity.

Not only can a change be good from a psychological point of view (renewing your motivation and keeping things interesting), but it can also have positive physiological effects, challenging your strength or endurance or engaging new muscle groups.

Keep a food diary

You might wonder how simply tracking what you eat might actually improve your health. It’s a bit like our step count in that you can’t manage what you don’t measure. For many of us, our diet becomes so habitual (hello, 3pm Freddo Frog) that we actually lose sight of what we’re eating over the course of a day.

If you’re prone to emotional eating, this can also be really helpful as you can begin to connect the dots and understand what might trigger you to overindulge and adjust your approach accordingly. For example, I know that I’m twice as likely to eat sugary snacks if I have multiple deadlines looming, so I can prepare by making sure I take enough healthy food with me into the office.

Get more sleep

It seems as though this message is being echoed from just about every health professional, media outlet and blogger – and it’s for good reason. There’s a lot of research happening in this space and we’re beginning to learn just how important sleep is for our minds and bodies.

In an age where we’re constantly on our phones and feel busier than ever, it can be really difficult to prioritize sleep. Try a few of these tips to make sure you’re getting the shut eye you need in order to properly recover from your day and prepare for the next.

Challenge yourself

I don’t know whether it’s our appetite for instant gratification or the appeal of a total overhaul, but boy, do humans love a challenge. There are plenty of less-than-healthy challenges out there (the eight or twelve-week kind that promise weight loss… as long as you’re only eating 1200 calories a day or less) but there are also lots of positive and worthwhile ones.

For some people, investing in a challenge program (like this one) gives them accountability and motivation. However, you can set up your own challenge however you like, without paying a cent. Why not set yourself a time frame – say, 12 weeks over spring – and set a goal to achieve in that timeframe. It can be anything from going to yoga three times a week, to trying a new healthy recipe once a week, or working up to a performance-based goal like a five-kilometre run. Make it something that fits with your goals and lifestyle that carries meaning for you.

It’s not about getting washboard abs in time for summer, but making you feel better from the inside out. Most of us feel more confident and healthy when we’re investing time in our health – so use spring as a time to implement some changes that will have you feeling fantastic regardless of the season.