According to recent reports and advice from nutritionists, the below list of health tips are some of the most important and helpful habits to adopt after the age of 25. For those of us who are terrible at sticking to routines, these tips are super easy to remember and include in your new and improved daily routine, without too much hassle!
Eat protein-rich brekkies
Weâve heard it a million times before âbreakfast is one of the most important meals of the dayâ, but is there any truth to this and does it apply to everyone? Research reflects that people in their 20âs are far more likely to skip brekkie, but apparently this could have detrimental effect on our overall physical and mental well-being. Breakfast literally means âbreaking the fastâ because itâs the first meal we consume after we wake up, providing us with the energy we need to face the day, but skipping this meal could result in decreased mental response times, an unwillingness to exercise and of course can make you extremely âhangryâ.
For those who do eat brekkie, itâs all too easy to throw together a bowl of sugary cereal before running off to work, but though efficient, this isnât the best thing for us and will likely make us feel hungry again shortly after consumption. Instead, try filling your belly with healthy proteins like full-fat yogurt or eggs.
Avoid sugary drinks
After a long day at the beach in the scorching sun, nothing hits better than a cold, crisp can of soft drink or a sugary juice! Same goes for the morning after a long night of drinking with mates, but unfortunately, these are the sorts of temptations we need to avoid. Dropping this bad habit is the key to better health, avoiding excess weight gain and clearer skin, so try switching up the juice and soft drink for a tall glass of water and if youâre craving a little flavour, why not chuck in a cheeky slice of lemon?
Eat more veggies and eat them first
As meat eaters, we could always do with introducing more vegetables into our diet. Most of us learnt as kids that vegetables contain all sorts of healthy nutrients including potassium, vitamin A, vitamin C and fibre, all of which have their own benefits on the body.
The only issue is, we donât always prioritise our vegetables when weâre cooking or even when theyâre on our plate. According to Australian dietary recommendations, women between the ages of 19 and 50 years-old should be eating five servings of vegetables a day, which translates to roughly 375 grams per day. To ensure that we arenât just cooking the veggies but actually eating the full serving, try eating the vegetables before approaching anything else on your plate. Recent studies show that when competing with other delicious food on our plates, veggies are likely to be deprioritised and eaten last or not at all, however, when eaten on their own, we are more likely to finish the entire serving.
Donât be afraid of fats
Contrary to what you might have heard, itâs important you remember to include fats in your diet. Iâm not talking about the fat youâd find in a piece of KFC chicken, but rather unsaturated fats. The two subcategories of unsaturated fats include monosaturated fats and polyunsaturated fats. These particular types of fat help to decrease the likelihood of heart disease and will lower cholesterol levels, as long as they are consumed in place of saturated fats, not as well as.
Polyunsaturated fats include omega-3 fats (found in fish) and omega-6 fats (found in soybean oil and nuts). Then thereâs monosaturated fats which you can be found in avocados, canola and olive oil and buts such as almonds and cashews. These things are pretty easy to include in your diet as long as they are being consumed in small amounts, so it wouldnât hurt to get into the habit of checking the labels on products before you buy them to ensure what you are consuming is higher in poly and mono fats and lower in trans and saturated fats.
Get to bed earlier
While youâre relaxing on the couch watching your favourite Netflix show, itâs very easy to lose track of time, before you know it, itâs 11PM and by the time you fall asleep, youâve only got about five to six hours of good sleep ahead of you. A serious lack of sleep doesnât just affect our energy levels the following day, it can also have a detrimental affect on our long-term health increasing the risk of heart disease, high blood pressure and obesity.
When our bodies donât get enough sleep, we stop producing a special hormone which helps to supress appetite. Naturally, this can result in unwanted weight gain which we all know, is harder to lose than it is to gain. To avoid this, we should really be trying to get between seven and eight hours of sleep per night.
Obviously, for some of us this isnât possible, whether that be because we work late nights, have young kids or are just terrible sleepers, but we need to prioritise sleep as best we can. Our seven to eight hours doesnât need to be back to back, so if the mood arises, try to nab yourself a quick 30-minute nap.
If you do struggle to get to sleep at night, you should be getting into the habit of heading to bed half an hour earlier than usual and winding down with a podcast or book. Most importantly though, try not to look at your phone! There are many reasons for this, one being that our phones stimulate our brains which means our minds are more active than they should be before we fall asleep. Secondly, the blue light produced by our phones can supress melatonin (the sleep chemical) and thirdly, arousing emotions before you fall asleep can delay REM sleep.
These five habits arenât too hard to adopt and if youâre in your 20âs, now is the perfect time to start a new health routine to ensure these healthy habits are engrained in your mind for the next few decades and to pass on to our future generations.
