This is a contributed post.

When it comes to taking charge of our health, we seem to have this misconception that we have to get everything perfect and take massive action all at once, but really that’s not true at all – what we have to do is start where we are and build things up slowly. This is especially important if we don’t want to lose motivation for our healthy lifestyle.

In this post, we’re sharing some simple steps you can take to ensure better health.

Daily Exercise:

Ensuring that we move our body daily is crucial for building and maintaining good overall health. The part that people get wrong with this is that once they decide to adopt a healthier lifestyle, they immediately start thinking they have to be in the gym everyday, but that’s just a fast way to fail and go back to an old, unhealthy routine. In actuality, all you need to start off with is 20 minutes of short exercise, such as walk or going swimming or even making time to go with a friend each week if you find a class that offers Yoga for 2 or joining a group class.

Plenty Of Sleep:

Although it’s not expected that you’ll always get the recommended hours of sleep every single night, it’s crucial that you at least get as close to it as possible and also try to maintain a good sleeping pattern where you don’t go to sleep too late and even sleep in a bit longer if you feel you need. Sleep is not just crucial for helping you stay awake and feel energized, but also in helping you maintain a good level of health.

Stop Smoking:

Everyone knows that smoking is bad for health, yet if you have a habit, then it can be difficult to break. Of course, stopping is the ideal destination for your health, but instead of just trying to go cold turkey, you can try things like cutting down, creating a savings jar to help motivate you to put the money in there instead, or even switching to an e-cigarette. You can find these online, and it definitely costs a lot less than regular cigarettes, and is better for you.

Consume Less Sugar:

When switching to a healthy lifestyle or diet, it’s not just about choosing what looks like the healthier alternative, but more about looking at what’s actually in the food you’re eating. Sugar is in pretty much everything – even in things we normally would consider to be healthy and wouldn’t think would contain sugar, such as pasta sauces, bread, and even the smoothies and granola bars that position themselves as more healthy. Sugar is a huge problem in our society and it’s something that we massively over-consuming, so in order to cut out refined sugar from our diet as much as possible, making sure we cook things from scratch when we can and switching to more whole, natural foods instead of packed or processed options is really going to make a big difference on the way to a healthier lifestyle.

Hopefully this post has helped you to see that it’s not about making massive changes all at once, but simple and small changes you can start with and build on over time.

This post includes collaborative content.