Productivity Tricks For Every Aspect of Your Life
We all aspire to live a nutritious life; yet, with so much weighing on our minds, demanding our time, energy, and attention, it can be difficult to live the life we truly desire. I believe the key to success is to be super organized and intentional about every aspect of our health and wellness to make it easier for us to live the life we want. To me, organizing isn’t simply about being neat and tidy. Organizing is the process by which we create environments that enable us to live, work, and relax exactly as we want. And, when we organize around a specific goal, it becomes easier to accomplish. It’s all about seeing what’s on the other side of the disorganization and clutter: a healthy, happy life. While the exact ingredients that make up a nutritious life will look different for everyone, these eight organizing hacks can help you jump start your routine. Streamline Cooking Make cooking healthy meals easy by coming up with a set of 5 to 10 quick, go-to recipes. Write each recipe out on individual notecards and include a list of all necessary ingredients on the back of each. Keep the note cards easily accessible for reference when planning lunch and dinner. Not into notecards? Try sites like Yummly where you can save your favorite recipes digitally. Don’t forget to phase out old recipes and replace them with new ones once a month so they don’t get stale. Plan Tomorrow + 2 Close out each day by spending 15 minutes reviewing what you completed, and plan your schedule for tomorrow + 2 days beyond that. A 3-day arc allows you to mentally prepare for the upcoming days. It assures that nothing is falling through the cracks, while giving you the perspective needed to adjust when you find yourself fielding unexpected curveballs. Practice Presence With so much going on in our lives and the world at large, it can be hard to live in the moment. One of the surest ways to reconnect to your immediate surrounding is to do a quick sensory check. Slow down and look around. What do you see? What do you feel, smell, hear, taste? Use all five senses to connect to details of your current moment. The act of slowing down and forcing yourself to take in the situation, sense by sense, will ground you in the present moment. Power Down Eliminate screen use starting at least 60 minutes before bed. Set an alarm to go off at the same time every night, cuing you to shut down all devices. There’s no more email, social media, online shopping, or Tic Toc videos. While we often turn to screens to unwind, research shows that the light they emit actually stirs us up and interferes with our natural sleep cycles. Exercise Efficiently Rethink your exercise routine with high-intensity interval training. HIIT workouts allow you to trade duration for intensity and provide the greatest ROI—getting the blood flowing, muscles pumping, and calories burning in the shortest amount of time. The key is to alternate intervals of high and low intensity exercise—walking for three minutes and jogging for one minute, repeating the cycle over 15-30 minutes. YouTube is loaded with free HIIT workouts you can do from the comfort and privacy of your own home, no equipment needed. Nurture Relationships in Microbursts Instead of waiting for big blocks of uninterrupted time (which inevitably never come) to nurture your relationships—focus on delivering short bursts of undivided attention on a consistent basis. Have breakfast with your spouse, phone a friend on your lunch break just to check in, or get down on the floor and play with your kids for a few minutes every day after work. It’s amazing how much you can accomplish in short bursts of time simply by being present (fully, truly present) with the people you care about. Create 2 Daily Anchors As an adult, “time-out” has a different connotation. To ensure that you always remember to take time out for yourself, build two non-negotiable anchors of self-care into each day. For example, no matter what happens, you always start the day at 8:00 a.m. with 15 minutes of exercise to get your blood pumping and your mind active; or, you always take a walk around the neighborhood to end your work day and transition into the evening; or, you always spend 20 minutes after dinner reading or working on a hobby. Whatever you choose, make sure that it is something that truly relaxes or inspires you. Make Hydration Fun Make drinking water all week long easy and tasty.Fill two pitchers of water with fresh, clean water infused with ingredients of your choice: cucumber, lemon, berries, mint, etc. Keep the pitchers in your fridge so that you have delicious, chilled water on hand and ready whenever you’re feeling thirsty. You don’t have to change your entire lifestyle or make huge sacrifices to feel more organization in your life. Rather, it requires presence and intentionality, making the most of the moments we have to nurture ourselves and others. When we organize our space and prioritize our time to reflect that which we value and aspire to, everything begins to feel right. (photo credit: Shutterstock)
10 Surprising Healthy Habits Wellness Experts Trust
There are eight pillars of living a Nutritious Life because we believe that a balanced lifestyle encompasses much more than just “more sweat, less sugar”—and when you ask wellness experts to share the healthy habits that add vibrancy to their lives on the reg, it’s obvious most agree. Over time, we’ve tapped a variety of these role models—from celebrity yoga teachers and trainers to superstar nutritionists and healthy chefs—to share how they live their own Nutritious Lives. Within the interviews, they revealed super interesting insights into healthy habits they swear by, some of which may surprise you. We’re sharing 10, here, to inspire your own well-rounded wellness regimen. Surprising Healthy Habits Wellness Experts Trust 1. Eat food that makes you feel good. It’s not always about balancing protein and carbs or scouring labels for organic ingredients, say Sakara founders Whitney Tingle and Danielle DuBoise. Eating Empowered, to them, is “knowing what it feels like to eat good food. Food is meant to be nourishment and food should make you feel sexy!” Read more. 2. Align your body, and your life will follow. “Finding alignment in your physical body is the first step to aligning your life, connecting to your gifts, attracting your deepest desires and feeling like you are on your true path,” says foam-rolling guru and best-selling author Lauren Roxburgh. “Over the years as I was so deeply studying the body, I realized many other things in my life and self were also coming into ‘alignment.’ I’ve seen it with hundreds of my clients too.” Read more. 3. Sip on water and tea as often as possible. Nearly all of the experts mention hydration as incredibly important, and Nutrition Stripped founder and RD McKel Hill swears by supplementing plenty of lemon-spiked H2O with matcha lattes and all kinds of other teas. “I’m a huge tea drinker all day long, whether it’s green tea, liver supportive tea, peppermint, or ginger. #gimmiealltheteas” Read more. 4. Give back. Sure, wellness is about your life, but focusing on others may also be essential to finding balance. “I try to pour my energy into causes that I am passionate about, like eating disorder recovery, animal rescue and raising awareness of cyberbullying,” says The Balanced Blonde blogger Jordan Younger. “I host a lot of events that give back to some of my favorite local LA organizations that raise funds/awareness for those causes.” Read more. 5. Design your space for great sleep. Chef, author, and all-around wellness star Candice Kumai details how getting a solid night’s sleep starts with how you design your space. “No electronic devices in the bedroom, no TV in the house—only reading, art, vision boards, and photography on our walls. Plus, lots of plants in the house for oxygen.” Read more. 6. Surround yourself with happy people. “I collect loving people in my life every day,” explains fitness celeb extraordinaire Natalie Jill. “When I meet positive, goal oriented, successful, happy, loving, and energetic people…I want them in my life. I find ways to be around them. They energize me, inspire me, and help me want to better myself! And when I am my better self, I am able to love more.” Read more. 7. Ask yourself, “How important is it?” When your clients include Jennifers with the last names Aniston and Lawrence, life can be pretty busy. To make it through tough situations, yoga teacher-to-the-stars Mandy Ingber asks herself this simple question. “The phrase ‘How important is it?’ reminds me that there are no big deals. When my behavior and actions are aligned with my own moral compass, I can handle life’s twists and turns,” she says. “Although a learned skill, relaxing into what comes is the discipline I practice. Everything is as it should be, and I can trust that my life is unfolding before me in perfect order.” Read more. 8. Make time for real meals. Maintaining a healthy diet is easier when you’re organized about your eating and in control of your meals says Deliciously Ella blogger Ella Woodward. “It’s easy to snack, snack, snack, but I like to sit down to proper meals, and I like to cook my meals,” she says. Read more. 9. Move, at least a little bit, every. single. day. “Trying to move a little every day is a big part of my life. It doesn’t always happen, but I feel the best when I’m more active. Every little bit adds up,” says Michele Promaulayko, author of 20 Pounds Younger and the Editor-in-Chief at Cosmopolitan magazine. “You don’t have to run for hours on a treadmill to burn fat.” Read more. 10. Don’t discount the power of me-time. If you’ve got a hobby that makes you happy or feel refreshed whenever you take a hot bath, those things have real value, even if they feel indulgent. Celebrity yoga teacher Kathryn Budig nurtures herself regularly with “epsom salt baths, reading juicy fiction novels, taking time to write for myself, and experimenting in the kitchen.” Read more.
