With the New Year just around the corner, many people are undoubtedly thinking of ways to improve their health. The problem with that, however, is that many people don’t follow through with their New Year’s resolutions, making it difficult to create positive habits. Sometimes it’s impossible to incorporate everything at once, which is why we recommend combining new habits slowly but surely. The same thing goes for losing weight. Losing weight is a process. If you want to stick with it, it’s important to open your mind to new ways to reach your weight loss goals. We discuss a fantastic way to get your health on track and lose weight in the Body Reboot book. In addition to our book, below are ways to improve your health in 2019 and beyond.

Calm Your Mind

Reader’s Digest recommends practicing medication and other ways to relax. Regularly participating in activities that help you can lower your anxiety and help you feel less depressed.

Clutterbugs, this one’s for you. Instead of telling yourself you’ll be more organized this year (as you’ve vowed last year and many years before that), try meditating once a day. “When people are stressed, hurried, anxious, or depressed, they don’t want to keep their place clean,” says Sherry Blair, PhD, a positive psychology expert and University of Southern California adjunct instructor. “Mindfulness will help center you.” Science has even proven the extent of these benefits. In a study of 3,515 adults published in JAMA Internal Medicine, researchers found 30 minutes of meditation every day improved symptoms of depression and anxiety in participants after eight weeks. “When people start cleaning up, you can tell they’re feeling better,” says Blair.

Drink More Water

Drinking water has many benefits, and it also helps with dehydration. Pretty Wellness offers suggestions on a few ways you can incorporate water into your diet and why it vastly improves one’s health.

When the body is dehydrated, it doesn’t run efficiently. Drinking water has plenty of benefits including increasing energy, flushing out toxins, improving skin complexion and boosting immunity, to name a few. If you don’t like plain water, try infusing it or drinking a non-GMO tea.

Apologize and Mean it

It’s easy to make an apology, but it’s more than just apologizing. You should truly say you’re sorry as opposed to saying it just because it’ll help keep the peace. NBC News discusses why saying your sorry and meaning it is so important:

Whether you got in a tiff with a friend, family member or colleague, get better at apologizing by doing what you can to reconcile the conflict, rather than hold a grudge, Emiliana Simon-Thomas, Science Director of the Greater Good Science Center at University of California, Berkeley, tells BETTER. It takes little risk and little time, but it can be intrinsically rewarding in a big way.

Being able to say you’re sorry and mean it, makes it easier to get back to a positive mood after going through something difficult, Simon-Thomas says. “Positive states, like contentment, warmth and trust, are important to health, social connection and focus — and they confer an overarching sense of personal stability and resilience to stress.”

Walk More

Your diet plays a huge part in losing weight, but so does exercising. Even something as simple as a walk can help burn calories, and also help you focus on your wellness better. Focusing on your overall health has many benefits from sleeping better to less stress.

Really, take more steps. “Instead of just worrying about working out during the week, I want my clients to turn their focus to accumulating more steps during their day-to-day activities,” says Shannon Fable, director of exercise programming at Anytime Fitness. “Even 500 extra steps for five days will lead to significant changes.” You can also schedule breaks during the day to stroll around the block or walk to your coworkers’ desks instead of emailing. This way, you’re focusing on overall wellness (hello, healthier arteries!) rather than just shedding pounds. “The goal should be achieving a healthier lifestyle, not just losing the weight,” says nutritionist Rania Batayneh, author of The One One One Diet. “With wellness, weight loss can happen naturally.”

Hopkins Medicine also mentions how to incorporate better walking into your daily routine:

Getting the recommended 30 minutes of exercise each day can be as simple as taking a walk. If you’ve got a busy schedule, take three 10-minute walks throughout your day. “That’s 10 minutes before work, 10 minutes at lunch and then 10 minutes after work. Make it fun! Grab a partner at work to get you through your lunch routine. Then have a friend or family member meet you for an evening stroll,” suggests Johns Hopkins physical therapist Stacie Page.

Add New Healthy Food Each Week (Or Each Day)

It’s hard to learn to eat healthier food, but going on a low carb diet certainly helps, as well as slowly implementing food such as more vegetables. Vegetables may not taste great, but Healthy Decisions say they help you stay on track and make healthier decisions.

Better yet, make it a family affair. Start with the alphabet: week one, A is for asparagus. Eat them raw, sautéed, baked, grilled. Week two, B is for brussel sprouts. Eat them sautéed, baked with balsamic glaze or peeled into brussel sprout hash. Check out #ONENEWFOOD for photos and ideas. Here are the small substitutions I made when I started on my journey eating clean.

Have an Attitude of Gratitude

Staying grateful is an excellent way to start the New Year right, and you can do that by creating a gratitude journal and shift your focus. Hopkins Medicine discusses how to do this more below:

Take some time at the beginning or end of the day to reflect on what you’re grateful for. “A daily grateful check-in or keeping a grateful journal is a way to shift your focus and minimize the distorting influence of stress. Reminding ourselves of the small, everyday positive aspects of our lives helps to develop a sense of balance and perspective that can enhance well-being,” says Johns Hopkins psychiatrist Susan Lehmann, M.D.

Reboot Your Diet

Sticking to a diet is hard, which is why we recommend the keto diet, which we briefly discussed in our introduction. It can be hard sticking to a diet because some diets seem impossible to follow. However, by eating fewer carbs and more fat, your body learns not to crave carbs as much, making it much easier to lose weight. CNN provides some tactics on how to stick to a healthy diet, and if you’re on a low carb diet these techniques are much easier to follow:

When it comes to cleaning up your eating, take a tip from the Boy Scouts: Be prepared. If you want to rise above temptation, like a yummy app spread at a party, you have to think one step ahead, says New York City nutritionist Joy Bauer, RD, Today show contributor and founder of Nourish Snacks. It also helps to have no-deprivation strategies, she adds: “Eating better is often associated with misery, so it's no wonder that so many people throw in the towel.” Use these tactics to eat healthier, long-term.

Get-in-shape goals tend to fizzle as early as the third week of January, per recent data based on Facebook searches. Yet some keep at it. What's their secret? “People who are successful are more likely to view fitness as a permanent lifestyle change, not an activity they can give up once they reach a number on the scale,” says Kirsten McCormick, founder of Running with Forks, a wellness coaching company in Seattle.

“It's easier to make a plan to go running three times this week than vow to run three times a week indefinitely,” says Whelan. “If you make your fitness goals week by week rather than so far-reaching, you'll have more success, and that in itself is motivating.”

“One big problem with making stress reduction your New Year's resolution is that it's so abstract,” says Markman. “You can't just vow to relax without being more specific.” And since you're not about to quit your job and hightail it to a peaceful island (you aren't, right?), it's crucial to learn the tools that will make your everyday tension less toxic.

2019 is the perfect time to make healthy changes, and that includes rebooting your diet. We can help you do that and offer support on how to get and stay healthy! At the time of writing this post, we're giving away free copies of the Body Reboot book, which discusses the many benefits of the keto diet. Help us cover the cost of shipping, and we’d be happy to send you a FREE book. Head to this page right away to see if there are any remaining copies.

Sources: Reader’s Digest, Pretty Wellness, Hopkins Medicine, CNN, NBC News