Upgrade Your Health by Raising Your Standards (Starting Now!)

The life that you’re now living is a reflection of the standards that you currently hold for yourself.

Is there an area in your life where you need to raise the bar?

Are you tolerating feeling subpar?

As you go through the process of making little daily shifts, it’s hard to see the change while it’s happening.

But then you wake up one day and look around, and you see that your life is vastly different from what it once was.

And once you’ve become accustomed to specific standards – it’s hard to turn back

Here are 5 areas to consider setting a new standard for yourself:

1. Food Quality. Enjoying minimally processed foods that fuel your body and leave you feeling good – not low on energy, tired, and bloated. Also, just because it’s “free” doesn’t mean you need to eat it.

2. Eating Habits. Making mealtimes sacred. Take the time to sit down, slow down, and enjoy your food. Whether you’re at home or the office. Don’t fall into the rut of eating in front of the television or computer. Even if you’re dining at home alone, set a proper place (preferably at a table) and focus on eating only. Also, are you overeating? Snacking indiscriminately at all hours of the day? Overdrinking?

3. Exercise & Sleep. Movement & sleep are two of our basic needs yet so many people neglect these areas. Prioritize exercise every day, and this doesn’t mean that you need to hit the gym or exercise intensively, but at a minimum, try and go for a walk outside. Make a habit of getting into bed at a reasonable time (rather than watching another episode on Netflix) and practice good sleep hygiene if falling asleep is an issue for you. When you wake up well-rested and feeling refreshed, it changes everything!

4. Self-Care. Sometimes self-care looks like putting yourself to bed early, or choosing the salad over the fries, or choosing water over wine, or going to that gym class, even when you don’t feel like it, because you’re focused on the future you who will feel great afterwards. But it’s also about the thoughts that you entertain and how you speak to yourself. Your thoughts and beliefs determine how you feel, which in turn determines how you show up in your life, and ultimately, the results that you get.

5. Brain Food, aka, how you feed your mind. Everything from the books that you read, the movies that you watch, the social media accounts you follow, to the conversations you engage in, all influence how you feel. For example, how do you feel when you read diet books or magazines centred on the lives of celebrities? Or after engaging in the office gossip? Or after scrolling through Instagram accounts focused on #thinspo and #fitspo? If you end up feeling bad about yourself or find yourself suddenly in a negative mood, it might be time to consider new sources of entertainment.

Tell me in the comments below, where do you need to raise your standards? What’s one small step you can take today to begin?