Diet and Exercise – How to Introduce Healthy Diet and Exercise to Your Daily Routine

Diet and exercise is a combination that will help you to avoid various chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, and stroke; although that fact is widely known, apparently it is still difficult for most of people who have used to current sedentary lifestyle. Due to this behavior, nearly 300,000 people in U.S. die each year from diseases that related to inactivity and unhealthy diet.

Actually, it is not that difficult to slip exercises between your daily routine and starting a healthy eating behavior; these are few diet and exercise tips that you might find useful:

1. Start slowly; this applies for both diet and exercise. You can't suddenly reduce your meal portion drastically or jogging 5 miles every morning; build up new eating behavior and activity gradually over a period of months instead.
2. Water is one of the best ways to keep your metabolism going and keep your body healthy. Eight to ten (8 oz glasses) glass of water per day is recommended for everyone. Just remember not to exceed water since it can flush out too many nutrients from the body.
3. As a start, try to increase your physical activity during your typical day. Walking to the nearest shop, take stairs instead of elevator, take a little farther parking spot, and maybe a light jog before starting your working day are a great start.
4. You can start to change your diet by reduce your meal portion and make your regular meal time from three to five times a day. This way, you will keep full all day, avoid too much snacks, and keep your body metabolism at good rate. During this period, take some times during break to learn about healthy eating, various foods that provide proper nutrients, and the ability to distinguish good and bad food by reading food label.
5. When you have used to light daily physical activities, accumulate 30 minutes of cardiovascular activities each day. You can split this to smaller sessions, for instance: divide it in three sessions, each session take 10 minutes. Including swimming and increase your jogging duration are good ideas. From my experience, jog with a friend or favorite pets can be a really good moment, otherwise strap your MP3 player and listen to your favorite songs; you will be surprise on how much distance you've covered when you are not actually counting each of your steps or keep looking at your watch.
6. Introduce various healthy foods that you've known to your daily meals. Reduce trans fat, saturated fat, caffeine, alcohol, refined sugar, salt gradually. At the same time increase vegetable, fruits, cereal, lean meat, and low fat dairy products consumption.
7. The next step in diet and exercise is including weight training; this maybe hard for some people but gaining more muscle means you'll be one step away from obesity which is the trigger to many other chronic diseases. Add two weight training sessions per week in your schedule when you feel that you are ready.

I know this introduction of diet and exercise to your daily life won't be a walk in the park; it is easy to break into temptation and it will probably happen many times. When this happens, simply restart the whole program and try to hold for longer period this time.