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(HealthNewsDigest.com) – The things you do every day can have a huge impact on your life as a whole. It’s not enough to have been in great shape a few times throughout your life — it’s the good habits that you were able to continuously maintain that will help you stay healthy and age gracefully as the years go by. With that in mind, here are some healthy habits you should consider making part of your routine.
1 – Exercising
Many struggle to turn exercise into a daily routine, but that’s often because they set the wrong goals for themselves. If you are trying to look as sexy as the model on a magazine cover, that will indeed take a lot of pain and sacrifice. However, if your goal is simply to be healthy, you don’t have to work that hard.
It’s important to remember that any exercise will always beat no exercise. This means that if you can’t fit a 60-minute workout as part of your daily routine, it’s fine to tone it down to 30 minutes, or even 15 minutes. Just find a number and an amount you can do every day. Consistency is the key.
2 – Stretching
Stretching regularly comes with a lot of health benefits, from improving blood flow to helping to prevent heart conditions. But the biggest benefit is also the most direct of the bunch: stretching helps you stay flexible. And flexibility does a lot more than just allow you to show off on social media.
Your body’s flexibility plays a big role in how well your joints absorb impact, which can help prevent injuries and boost the longevity of your joints. Stretching and relaxing your various muscle groups can also relieve tension in those areas, which can stop you from developing chronic pain in regions like your back and neck.
3 – Meditating
People often make the mistake of thinking of meditation as something spiritual. It can be, but the trance induced by medication is also a medically recognized state that can be easily spotted on an MRI. And the benefits of meditating every day have also been widely studied and documented. Meditation can help with everything from lowering stress levels to helping people be more self-aware and think more clearly. And since stress can wreak havoc on your health, people who meditate are often reported as being healthier overall.
4 – Eating healthy foods
As far as diets go, the best thing you can do for your long-term health is to adopt an eating style and stick with it. Studies disagree on whether following a vegetarian, vegan, DASH, or Mediterranean diet is healthier, but most studies find that following a strict set of diet guidelines is healthier than eating at random over the years.
However, if that’s a step you don’t want to make, there is another option. You can make healthy foods part of your daily diet without limiting what you eat. Whole grains are rich in fiber and nutrients, ginger Kombucha comes packed with healthy antioxidants and probiotics, and there are many other examples of foods and drinks you can start consuming daily for great health benefits. And adding to your diet is often easier than limiting what you eat.