Photo: cmaccubbin / Flickr

The benefits of healthy living are incredibly obvious. You look and feel more attractive. As a result, your confidence shoots through the roof, which has innumerable positive effects on the rest of your life. You also feel more vital, thus increasing your lifespan dramatically. Basically, a healthy lifestyle is superior to an unhealthy lifestyle in every way imaginable.

So one would think more people would be healthy, right? Right, but going from a slouch to fit is more difficult than most people are willing to bear. Or is it? Below we look at how mastering the components of fitness progress makes becoming healthier far simpler than you may think.

Eat better

The simplest way to become healthier – which for many people translates to losing weight – is to eat better. This doesn’t necessarily mean dramatically altering your diet from a joyous meat-eater to a vegan, but rather being mindful of the food most detrimental to your health and then removing it from your diet. Once you cut out the extreme junk and settle on a marginally healthier diet for some time, revise your diet again. This staggered fitness progress approach to healthy eating is far more effective than dramatic changes to your diet or, worse still, a crash course diet.

Workout

The second component to looking and feeling healthier is working out. Fortunately, with the many advancements made in fitness technology and training methods, you have a myriad of options, each suited to your weight and experience level. At the most basic level, you can opt for a pair of running shoes and walk daily. Once you gather momentum, you can either add significant distance to your runs, or speed in intervals. Before you know it, you’ll be doing half marathons.

Alternatively you can pick up a new sport in much the same way. Hit a ball against the wall from a static position to begin progressing as a tennis player. Once your hand-eye coordination is in sync, start moving side to side up against that very same wall. When you’re confident, and really working up a sweat, challenge a human opponent. Before you know it, those two three-minute sets that used to tire you are hour-long sessions that end to soon.

That there is the magic of fitness progress.

The trick is progression

The magic, as you’ve no doubt gathered, is in measuring your fitness progress, while also taking time to settle at a certain level before propelling yourself to the next.

Tags: eating healthily, exercise, fitness, hobbies