Do’s and Don’ts of Healthy & Active Lifestyle for the whole family

Do you know what to do to have a healthy and active lifestyle? We believe that having a healthy and active lifestyle is a journey that involves the whole family and that you should have a plan. The plan will help you enjoy your journey.

Below are the Do’s and Don’ts that you can build your plan on. Have fun planning and taking the journey.

DO’s

– Exercise better – it is not a secret that exercise keeps us physically fit, improves our mental health, quality of life, and overall wellbeing.
It is much easier to encourage younger children to take part in sport, the older they get this becomes more challenging, and it’s true also for us grown ups. Exercising just get more challenging.
How about making it easier for your family, do it together! Exercising together can be a great way of spending time together as well as great way to include being active as a family.
Go for a walk or cycling or dance or play capoeira in the park; there are so different things you can do together.

– Keep a food diary to keep your energy high – check what you eat during a day or better during a week so you can get a better feel of what’s on your plate. Write all food as well as drinks and time of consumption. This will show you all you good and not so good choices. The later are usually foods that take away your energy. For example, the sweets are giving us a temporary high but this goes away very soon leaving us depleted from energy, this is called a sugar crush that negatively affect how your energy is distributed during a day.
Check your food diary to make sure you have more good food there that brings more energy.

– Drink plenty of water – it’s not a secret that hydration is a must when one want to lead a healthy and active life. Roughly about 60% of human body is actually water so replenishing it is crucial. The recommendation is to drink 6-8 glasses of fluid a day, water being the best choice of fluids.

– Sleep better – good sleep make such a difference. This apply for the little ones as well as grown ups. For us its 7-8 hours of sleep and NHS recommendation on time of sleep for children up to 1 year old is 12 to 16 hours, for children 1 to 2 years old it’s 11 to 14 hours, for children 3 to 5 years old it’s 10 to 13 hours, for children 6 to 12 years old it’ 9 to 12 hours, and for teenagers to 18 years it’s 8 to 10 hours.

DON’Ts

– Expect a quick fix – Healthy & active lifestyle is a journey that requires some lifestyle changes. You’re the only one who’s responsible for changes in your life the way you want. That takes commitment and time to create and follow through with a plan. Ease into your plan and allow yourself a balance in life. Keep up with eating well and allow some snacks of your choice to keep you motivated too. Remember that by building your good habits you show your child the good way of living!

– Strive yourself nor over eat – when we limit food intake or eat too much our metabolism slows down and we lack energy. We need to eat to live a healthy & active lifestyle, but going for extremes of not eating enough or too much is not right. Be a good example for your little ones and eat well. Check in with yourself; do I eat enough good food? Am I really hungry, or just bored, tired, frustrated, or anxious? Start to understand emotional eating.

– Skip breakfast – You wouldn’t let your child go to school without breakfast so make sure you have time to eat it as well. Breakfast fills us up and gets our metabolism going. We think it is a very important meal of the day that sets you up for the day. Enjoy it together with your family!

– Do it all at once – I’m sure you remember when your little one was learning how to walk. There were a series of repetitive actions that happened and they were very focus on that very task before moving to another thing to learn. Do that too, follow small steps approach to improving your life. Building healthy & active lifestyle is a journey and you “visit” many stops along the way. The stops we recommend to start with are exercise better, keep a food diary to keep your energy high, drink plenty of water, & sleep better.