It shouldn’t come as a shock that our lives should be in balance with everything around us to stay healthy. Life get’s rough or busy, or both, and we tend to navigate to one extreme or the other. We’re either walking around the block every morning and eating our fruits and veggies or we’re sleeping in and rushing to work and going out to lunch every day and stopping at a drive through on the way home because we just can’t seem to make time for our health.
What if we tried to do a little bit of everything? Life is never going to lay out the magic carpet for us to walk down and live a perfectly healthy life so we shouldn’t treat our lives as perfectly healthy all of the time. There will be times when you see some of your old friends one weekend and you may choose to drink some alcohol, yes we know alcohol isn’t good for us, but socializing is part of life. I am not advocating that you go out every weekend with your friends and get drunk, but what I am saying is that you should make time to spend time with the people you love and if you choose to have a few drinks as you visit with old friends then enjoy that time spent together. You could balance out the alcohol with healthy eating choices throughout the day and making sure you drink a lot of water to stay hydrated. It’s important to not let the habits of one weekend turn into the habits of the next week, then we’ve lost our ability to stay balanced, and our health will begin to deteriorate.
Maybe drinking isn’t something you enjoy but you love to go out with family and friends and load up on appetizers or dessert because everyone is together and having a good time. A good time doesn’t have to entail eating until you can’t eat any more or sacrificing all of the hard work you’ve spent creating healthier eating habits. You can work to create balance and enjoy some of the foods you don’t normally eat, like nachos at a Mexican restaurant, but instead of eating half of the plate, share it with everyone around the table and enjoy one or two nachos. Most importantly, enjoy the people gathered around the table and take your mind off of the food, you should recognize that you’re at dinner to spend time with the people you care most about, the food may be delicious but it pales in comparison to the joy the people you’re with bring to your life.
Balance is a part of life, and it takes a great deal of effort to practice balance, in my experience you won’t sustain a balanced life over night. It will take some trial and error to start to establish balance and it’s a continuous work in progress because each day is going to be different from the one before it. That means what worked for you one day won’t always work for you the same way the next day, or one weekend to the next weekend. Balance is about being open to new experiences and incorporating your foundation of healthy habits into the adventure that life creates so that you can adapt to life while still living a healthy lifestyle.
