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Healthy Living, Continued

• Go to bed. In addition to being chronically dehydrated, most Americans are also chronically sleep-deprived. I don't care how many of your friends do it; five or six hours a night is not enough! Active adults should get 8 hours of sleep per night, every night. Sleep is critical to the process of building muscle. The less you sleep, the less time your body has to build muscle, and less muscle means you burn fewer calories. The same way your body exacts a "dehydration tax" from your workouts and diet by not drinking enough water, so to does your body exact an even higher "sleep deprivation tax" that negatively affects your mental acuity, mood, and reflexes. Set your DVR to record the late night programs and watch them in the morning. Get thee to bed.
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• Make one small change every week. Starting at your baseline, make one small change to your diet and exercise regimen every week. If you're looking to lose weight, you may reduce your daily calorie intake by 150 every day, or replace your occasional junk food habit with fruit or nuts. For exercise, if you don't exercise at all now, you might start by going to the gym twice a week for 20 minutes. The next week, you might introduce vitamins or fish oil to your diet, and add 10 minutes to your twice-a-week workouts. The following week, you could try breaking up your three square meals a day into five smaller meals, and adding another day of 20-minute exercise. The week after that, reduce the total daily calories by another 100, and bump your third weekly workout to 30 minutes like the other two. Keep this up gradually until you find yourself with a completely healthy diet and exercise regimen that propels you steadily toward your goals.
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• Resist the temptation to skip ahead! You will almost certainly feel you can do more than the small, incremental weekly changes to diet and exercise recommended by this program. You will be tempted to slash the calories more dramatically, change the diet more drastically, or pile up the hours in the gym more quickly. DON'T DO IT! If you rush to discover the limits of your ability to handle workouts or dietary changes, you will burn out. You will fail to meet your goals, lose your motivation, and come next January you'll be making fitness resolutions again just like everyone else. Making small incremental changes gives you goals that you'll be able to hit each and every week, keeping you motivated and itching to make the next adjustment in your diet and exercise, and getting you that much closer to your overall fitness goals. Remember, getting healthy is a marathon, not a sprint. Pace yourself.

Below are a few more tips to help keep you motivated and moving toward a healthy lifestyle:

• Eat breakfast. Breakfast has long been the redheaded stepchild of meals, relegated to some overprocessed garbage that we grab as we rush out the door on the way to work. The experts say that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, but I'm going to put it much more bluntly: people that don't eat breakfast are shooting themselves in the foot health-wise. A pop tart is not breakfast. A bagel is not breakfast. A hot pocket is not breakfast. Coffee is not breakfast. Wake up 20 minutes earlier and make a real breakfast, preferably one high in fiber to help put the brakes on your appetite throughout the day. Fix up some oatmeal, eat a couple of apples or oranges or a banana, throw in a cup of lowfat yogurt, and have a handful of almonds, all washed down with a big glass of vegetable juice and water. You'll be amazed at your increased levels of energy and focus throughout the day, as well as how long it takes for you to get hungry again.
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• Replace Lunch Hour with Gym Hour. Nothing's worse than waking up at 4:30 a.m. so you can go to the gym before you go to work... except perhaps the notion of going to the gym after a grueling 9 or 10 hour work day. If you're lucky enough to have a gym in or near your office, get a membership. And if you're lucky enough to have the kind of schedule where you can skip the usual 11:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. lunch hour and instead take your 'personal' hour at say 2:00 p.m. or 3:00 p.m., you're twice blessed. I personally like to hit the gym at 2:30 p.m., because I'm back in the office by 3:30 p.m. and I don't have to worry about hitting that dreaded "wall" that makes people so sleepy around 3pm. And the best part: I don't have to worry about going to the gym after fighting through 45 minutes of rush hour traffic!

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