On a day-to-day basis, the majority of our thoughts and actions are on autopilot. We wake up in the morning, get ready to go to work, and then fill the rest of the day with things to do. After work, household tasks are always in constant competition with each other for which ones need to get done at the moment. Do I meal prep for the next couple of days, do I put away the clean clothes sitting in the basket, do I workout from home while the kids are at school, or tidy up before they get home? And more often than not, we tend to complete the essential tasks for everyone else in the home – putting ourselves, our health, and our wellbeing last on the list. 

Our society tends to overemphasize working out and eating healthy when it comes to achieving fitness goals. Still, we often don’t pay enough attention to the real reasons keeping us from them. The most common reasons people struggle to reach their fitness goals are lack of time, energy, and motivation to stay consistent. Revive Superfoods wants to help you adjust some of your habits to create sustainable change in your life and help you stay on track! Try out these healthy habits in order, and watch as your life becomes less stressful, more fulfilling, and more YOU! 

 

1. Let’s Declutter! Cluttered Space = Cluttered Mind

Clutter makes us feel flustered, anxious, and overwhelmed. This stress can physically cause the body to increase hunger and cravings throughout the day and leave you less likely to make the healthiest choices. Instead of tackling your overwhelming to-do list, you may fall prey to mindless munching as a form of avoidance and comfort. Clearing physical clutter will allow you to think more clearly, and make better decisions to leave you feeling good. 

*TIP: Spend 10-15 minutes each morning or night on decluttering one area of your life! Your desk, your closet, your car, your fridge, or tackle that pesky phone of yours. Clear up old pictures, delete apps you no longer use, and clear the 35,786 unread email notification you have! 

 

2. Make a “Me” Schedule

Being on auto-pilot isn’t always a bad thing! Our habits, routines, impulses, and reactions carry us through our lives, so we don’t have to stop and think about it every time we make a coffee or start the car. The only problem with being on autopilot for too long is that we forget that we’re on autopilot. When we’re not even aware of our habits, then we no longer control them; they control us. Knowing exactly how your day is going to go, planning, and executing is super important! Create a “Me” Schedule and put in things like your morning and evening routine, leisure time, productive time, sleep, etc., and make these a non-negotiable. These are times for you – to make your life more manageable and set you up for success! 

*TIP: On Sunday, take a look at your week and schedule in those “me” times. Of course, some weeks will be heavier than others, and that’s okay, but use your Sunday night to schedule in one thing a day for yourself! Whether it’s meal prep, your daily workouts, or wind downtime before bed, physically put it in your calendar and make it a priority!* 

 

3. Let us Take Care of Healthy Eating Habits For You!

Have you been told you need to have a healthier diet but don’t know how? Don’t want to put in the time and effort it takes to understand proper nutrition and what to eat daily to reach your fitness goals? Take out all the thought work and let Revive Superfoods handle the healthy eating habit for you! Having a healthy food subscription service will help ensure you always have something nutritious and ready in minutes. Make it easy on yourself, and let Revive handle the rest.

Try our Strawberry Zen and Pink Dragon, two of our best-selling smoothie options here at Revive Superfoods!

 

Written By Sara Prodanos (@sara.prooo). Sara is a Personal Trainer and Physical & Health Educator that is passionate about building strength from the inside out and doing things that make you feel good! 

REFERENCES: IT’S TIME TEXAS – From mindless munching to family feasts: Unpacking emotional eating

The concept of the new year’s resolution is sound: It’s a brand new year, a clean slate, a new beginning, and a chance to make the next year better than the last. It only makes sense that it feels like the perfect recipe for change within ourselves.

As a result, our solution is often to embark on an overnight overhaul of our lives. We commit to grandiose diet changes, or to a five-days-a-week workout plan. We believe, or at least we hope, the new year air circling around will provide the motivation and willpower we need to adopt an entirely new way of living.

To add fuel to the fire, advertisements for a 30-day body transformation or a 6-week fitness challenge are everywhere, leading us to believe that fitness, nutrition, and health changes will come fast and furious.

The reality is, they probably won’t come fast. Or furious. Lasting changes are generally slow and a little mundane. However, by embracing the long road, you’ll find yourself a lot further ahead at the end of this year than you ever will be.

Here’s our 3-step approach to putting yourself on a path to a healthier you this year — not just for 30 or 60 days, but for life.

 

1 – DISCOVER YOUR REAL PURPOSE

 

Pro Tip: Lose the guilt!

Oftentimes, new year’s resolutions stem from a build-up of guilt: guilt that we ate and drank too much the previous year, and especially over the holidays, and guilt that we didn’t stick to our commitment to go to the gym five days a week.

Remember that time you didn’t feel like showering before bed, even though you needed to? You didn’t launch yourself on a guilt trip the next day, or the next week. You simply returned to your routine of showering. The same is true here: Put last year in the past. Flush it down the toilet and approach the new year without a load of guilt on your back.

Next, take the time to consider what you actually want. Not what you think you should want, but what you actually want. Or at least what you’re actually willing to do.

When it comes to resolutions, people often commit to something like a strict diet or going to the gym five days a week. However, you probably have other priorities in your life—maybe you’re raising three kids and working 40 hours a week — so five days a week at the gym might not be a realistic expectation, nor is it something you’re willing to prioritize. The same is true of a complete diet overhaul: Are you really willing to give up all carbs the moment the clock strikes midnight? Are you ready to spend four hours of food prepping each Sunday to ensure you stick to the strict diet?

This is why it’s incredibly important to take a look at your life and consider what’s important to you. Once you do that, you’ll be able to figure out what you’re willing to give—and what you’re willing to give up — in order to reach perhaps more realistic, yet still notable, goals.

The great thing is, once your actions become in line with your true purpose or intention, the positive changes, and sacrifices you make this year won’t feel like they require willpower. Now you’ll be in a place where your decisions will feel right and natural because you’re living in alignment with what’s really most important to you.

 

2 – REVIEW OF THE PAST YEAR 

 

Pro Tip: Reflect and identify what brought you positive and negative emotions.

Though looking ahead can provide a sense of hope, it’s also incredibly valuable to do a review of the past year.

Specifically, go through your last year and make a list of 10-20 actions you took, events you attended, habits you adopted, moments you experienced, the decisions you made in that led to positive emotions. Similarly, make a list of 10-20 actions, events, habits, moments, or decisions in the past year that led to negative emotions.

It sounds a bit hokey, but it’s incredibly eye-opening and provides a true sense of comfort, as it allows you to see how your actions affected your life.

Better yet, now you can use that information to this year to do more of what brought you positive emotions and less of what brought you negative ones.

 

3 – STEP-BY-STEP, HABIT-BASED CHANGE

 

Pro Tip: Select a small, action-based habit. It can be something as simple as committing to drinking a glass of water when you wake up so you’re not famished for breakfast. Or something a little bigger, such as focusing on starting your day with a healthy breakfast.

Instead of employing massive overnight change, start small.

This happens to be our specialty. From our Blue Cacao or Acai Twist ready-to-blend smoothies, to our Banana Nut oats, we make breakfast easy, healthy and still super tasty.

Once you pick a habit, focus entirely on this one small habit. Don’t worry if you’re still not 100% where you want to be. Just commit to the one, manageable action you can control for one month.

Once this action starts to feel like a habit, where it no longer requires much thought or willpower — it typically takes a month to turn a new action into a habit — it’s time to choose a second habit to add to the first.

Maybe this new habit is going for a 20-minute walk during your lunch break at work. So now you’re starting out the day with a healthy smoothie or oat bowl, and then walking at lunch — better than you did last year.

By March, you’re eating a healthy smoothie for breakfast each day, walking at lunch and you have cut sugar from your coffee. By April, you have added in a Saturday morning workout to your week, and by May, you’re food prepping your lunches for the week on Sunday afternoons. You get the point.

Imagine where you could be by December? You could be in a place where processed foods are generally no longer part of your life, where you’re working out three days a week and going for weekday walks, and have lost 30 lbs.

But the best part is, the process of slow, steady habit-based change won’t feel as impossible and disruptive as a quick new year’s resolution, because you’ll never have to bite off more than you can chew.

Regardless of where you end up by the end of the year, one thing is for sure: You will be a lot further along than all of the other years you committed hard to some massive change in January, and where everything unraveled before March.

 

Final Pro Tip: Embrace the slow and steady road to success over the short-term resolution. Long-term, you will thank yourself for it.