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No matter who you are and what you’re doing, when you first start out toward any goal that requires a change in your behavior, it’s not easy. You automatically revert to your previous behavior out of habit. In order to see real change, you have to set reminders out for yourself to keep telling you to make that change. It isn’t that you don’t want to change your lifestyle, it’s just too easy to go on automatic pilot and revert to old behaviors, such as unhealthy snacking or forgetting to exercise.

Create a menu at first and clean out the refrigerator and cupboards.

If you’re used to snacking on chips at night, don’t buy them. It’s just to easy to forget your grand plan of eating healthier. Instead, leave yourself a reminder to air pop some popcorn or do a few exercises to help overcome the urge for chips. Most of the time you’re not really hungry, but looking for something to do and eating has filled that void. Keep healthy snacks in the refrigerator, just in case you really are hungry.

Schedule your workout.

Make an appointment with the gym in your schedule. You’re far less apt to miss something if you have an appointment. That’s one reason people often stick to a plan of exercize when they workout with a personal trainer. Set a reminder on your phone to leave for the gym, just as an extra nudge to ensure you go. Follow your reminder, don’t ignore it. If you’re normally the type that hits the snooze button on the alarm, have a second reminder set to go off five minutes later.

Put pictures and quotes up to remind you why you want to live healthier.

Maybe you have just had a health scare and your doctor said start living healthier. Even if it was bad, every day that passes, lessens the fear just a tiny bit, taking away a bit of incentive to workout. If you want to lose weight, take a picture of yourself now and one to represent you afterward. Photoshopping your head on to a body you want can be encouraging. Put up encouraging quotes throughout the house and become your best cheerleader for your own good health.

• Sometimes you have to take more action than just setting a reminder. Always eat before you grocery shop and carry a list of foods to buy.
• Pick a task that you struggle to do, such as running up several flights of stairs or lifting buckets of kitty litter. Every week, try that task as a reminder. One day you’ll be able to do it with ease.
• Carry a bottle of water with you everywhere to remind you to drink more water. Sip on it frequently throughout the day.
• Set your bedtime alarm. You have an alarm to get you up in the morning that has to work overtime if you procrastinate getting sleep at night. Set an alarm to remind yourself to go to bed. It’s much healthier for you than watching that rerun of “Friends” or “Golden Girls.”

There are so many stressors in our environment, from the food we eat, pollutants we breathe and the toxic stress at work or home, it’s important to revitalize your health and learn to live a healthier lifestyle. It won’t change the environment around you, but it can make you more able to live longer and with less stress. Even when the day is crazy, some of these tips can get you back to normal in no time at all.

Revitalize yourself with regular exercise.

Talk about a stress buster, there’s nothing better than exercise to do that. Of course, learning to be mellow with meditation also helps prevent the stress. Exercise does more than burn off the hormones of stress. It improves circulation, sending oxygen and nutrient rich blood to all areas of the body. It can improve your complexion, make you look years younger, help you stay healthier and even boost your energy level—just to name a few benefits.

Eating healthy will get you back on track.

If you’re out of sorts, it could be the food you eat. Highly processed foods often contain sugar that can set your blood sugar levels on a roller coaster ride. You’ll get cranky hungry quickly and then seek more sugar to level off, only to have it occur repeatedly. Lack of nutrients can set your body on a collision course. Try eating some baby greens to boost your nutrition. These are often called microgreens. They’re bigger than sprouts, but not yet matured. These nutritional packed powerhouses can have as much as forty times the amount of nutrients as the fully matured types. You don’t have to eat a full salad of them, just add a few to boost the nutrition.

Supplement your sunshine.

Even though Texas has plenty of sunshine, not everyone’s schedule allow them to bask in it. People who live in Northern areas don’t have the advantage of as much sun, so they have even more of a problem. Studies show that the vast majority of Americans have low vitamin D levels. A shortage of vitamin D can cause mineral shortages, since it affects the absorption. Vitamin D helps boost your immunity, keeps your body weight healthy and can help prevent serious diseases, including osteoporosis. It’s also mandatory for healthy teeth. A vitamin D3 supplement can help.

• Hang your head and improve your mood. Whether you do shoulder stands or finding a yoga position that sends blood rushing to your head, you’ll get results that improve your mood, improved digestion and better skin. Just hold the position for at least thirty seconds.
• Switch to other types of nut butters and vary the type frequently to boost all types of nutrients. You can create cashew butter at home by using a food processor, just as you can several other types of nut butter. However, some natural food stores have machines that process them for you. You just pour them into the processor, grind, then pay for the container of nut butter based on weight.
• Get some healthy fat. Not all fat is bad, some is super good for you. Butter made from milk of grass fed cows is actually heart healthy. So is the fat from avocados. Healthy fat also helps lift depression.
• Get more sleep at night. Americans are taught at an early age that a good work ethic that burns the candles at both ends is good. Well, it’s not. It deprives you of the chance to let your body heal and rest your mind and makes you work slower and harder.

If you’ve spent half your life calorie counting and find it boring and frustrating, don’t change it out for counting carbs. That’s just like calorie counting but with a twist. The best way to lose weight is to eat healthy and not worry about carbs or calories. There’s no need to record every bite, as long as you know the foods that are good for you and save you calories.

Learn about how to substitute one food for another.

Eating healthy isn’t really dieting. It’s just making smart choices when it comes to the food you eat. It may mean substituting brown rice for white rice to get more nutrients and cut out a few calories or having a healthy snack ready so you don’t wolf down a candy bar you bought at the gas station on the way home. It’s a learning process on simple changes to make when you eat and means you can eat anywhere.

Eating healthy means cutting out processed foods and supplementing your diet with whole foods.

Some of the most unhealthy foods you’ll find are in the deli section of the grocery. Processed meat like salami and hot dogs have very little nutritional value and contain a lot of calories, preservatives and salt. Many processed foods have had the nutrients cooked out of them or are filled with hidden sugar in the form of high fructose corn syrup. If you’re a label reader, you may even miss how high the content is because it’s disguised by using different terms and broken down to various types so it doesn’t appear high on the list. Processed baked goods, particularly those that contain white flour are also often unhealthy. To make matters worse, not all foods touted as health foods really are healthy.

Control the ingredients by making the dishes yourself.

It may seem like it takes more effort to make your own foods, but once you start and notice the difference in taste, you’ll be sold. Healthy diets don’t have to be difficult to follow or create. Some people make large portions and freeze half for later use, which saves both time and money. In fact, when you start eating healthy, you’ll not only notice you feel better, you’ll save money. Fast food and processed foods often cost more even though they contain fewer nutrients.

• Once you learn how to eat healthier, you’ll never have to worry about gaining weight again. It takes weight off permanently.
• There’s no failure when it comes to eating healthy. You can even have your favorite high calorie foods occasionally. Of course, not nearly as frequently as you did before and in smaller portions.
• You won’t get hungry like you would counting calories when you eat healthier. Most people find they feel full and never feel deprived.
• There are many bonuses you get from healthier eating that you don’t get from counting carbs or calories. One is a better complexion and another is more energy.

There’s a lot of hype about all the good a cleanse or detox can do for both weight loss and what ails you, but there’s very little evidence. One thing is certain, it does provide an opportunity to reboot your body, like you would a computer, and then start on a healthy diet adding new foods each day. It can be a way of finding food intolerance if you have problems after you eat and won’t really hurt you unless you have a medical condition.

Be aware of the best type of cleanse to use.

If you’re doing a fruit juice cleanse, you’ll be subjecting your body to a lot of fructose. That can set your body into a roller coaster of sugar highs and lows. Aside from that, a few days of drinking juice doesn’t have any long term negative effects. There are good effects from the fast type of cleanse where you simply sip on water. Unlike regular fasts that last for days, this is intermittent fasting, which means you fast for a period of time, such as 16 hours and eat during the 8 remaining hours. There are studies that show this type of cleanse won’t put your body into starvation mode and will help you lose weight and even live longer.

No matter what type of cleanse you choose, if you go back to unhealthy eating, it won’t do any good.

It all boils down to resetting your eating pattern and learning how to eat healthier. With a cleanse, you can reboot your body to eat healthier foods and shed those extra pounds. With intermittent fasting, you eat all your meals in a shorter time frame, so you often eat less than you would in the course of a normal day. Again, if the food you eat is cake, donuts and fried foods, you won’t get the beneficial effect you hoped to achieve.

Eating healthy and exercising is the best way to lose weight and keep it from returning.

While what you eat and when you eat it is important, exercising regularly is just as important for a healthy lifestyle and freeing you from the worry of extra pounds. Not only does exercising burn calories while you’re doing it, it builds muscle tissue in the process. Muscle tissue requires more calories for maintenance, so you’ll be burning more calories 24/7 and boosting your metabolism.

• Studies show that intermittent fasting can actually make you look younger for longer. It also can help you burn belly fat. It doesn’t require you go without eating, just start eating later in the day, noon for instance, and quit at about 8 o’clock.
• While there’s little evidence a cleanse helps, it can train your body to eat less. When you go back to eating, you’ll be more aware of how much you eat.
• The body naturally detoxes and cleanses itself, but if you’re feeling bloated and eating too much food, you’ll probably feel better after a day or two of a cleanse.
• Jack Goldstein wrote about a water fast and vegetarian diet he embarked. When he tested tongue scrapings, feces, perspiration and urine, he did find that their make up changed and even environmental toxins like DDT were eliminated.

If you crave something sweet after meal, it may be just habit, but there’s no need to quit eating a dessert. Fruits that make a sweet dessert can hit the spot and leave you feeling satisfied after a meal. While some areas of the country have a limited growing time, Texas has the benefit of fresh fruit almost year around, so it can be an inexpensive way to satisfy a sweet tooth.

Take advantage of seasonal fruit.

When fresh fruit is in season, it’s normally picked later in its growing cycle, at its peak, and local. The later its picked and the fresher it is, the more nutrients it has. The sweeter it is too! Spring and summer fruit includes cherries, grapes, berries, figs (which also grow in the fall), peaches, plums, nectarines and all types of melons. Fall fruit also include all types of melons, late grapes and pears. Pomegranate season is from October to December, while citrus fruit ripens from October to April. A dish of fresh fruit or mixed fruit doesn’t need anything extra. It’s sweet, delicious and healthy.

Spruce up that fresh fruit by making a sorbet.

Just cut up any combination of fresh fruit in chunks, put it in a covered plastic container and freeze it overnight. Use an ice crushing blender and blend until smooth and creamy. If I’m making enough to store in bags, I found that freezing the fresh fruit on a cookie sheet first to make sure the pieces don’t stick together, then transferring them to the bag is excellent. When you’re ready to use, just grab a handful. You can also create rich fruit ice cream with no milk or sugar by freezing a chopped banana and blending it with other frozen fruits. Bananas, grapes, jackfruit, mangosteen, papaya and persimmons are sweet fruits you can combine with others rather than sugar.

A little dark chocolate can be decadent and even good for you.

Making your own dark chocolate-dipped strawberries is simple and allows you to enjoy a bit of decadence that is rich in vitamin C, manganese and antioxidants. When you make it yourself you can select the healthiest dark chocolate option with the lowest sugar content and the highest concetration of cocoa solids. You also can control the amount of chocolate on each berry, dipping it midway up, rather than coating the whole berry to save calories. Eat just two or three, since the chocolate adds extra calories.

Keep it simple, save time and calories. A quarter cantaloupe filled with berries is a delicious filling dessert.

There’s no need to add sugar, but other healthy ingredients will do. I love celery with apples and pecans, sometimes in a dab of Greek yogurt. Fruit is naturally sweet, so creating a sugary sauce or adding sugar isn’t necessary.

Chilled citrus fruit is a treat when you peel it and remove the membranes around the flesh. It’s not that hard to do, especially for grapefruits and you can have a chilled treat ready in the refrigerator for dessert and snacks.

Create frozen fruit laden yogurt. Get healthy yogurt with no sugar added and mix with a generous portion of fruit. You can eat it immediately or freeze it for a special treat.