We’ve been talking a lot lately about how to make getting healthy easy in the Live Lighter’s Health Made Easy Series . Much of what’s been covered so far has been intangible, like common beliefs about health, alternative perspectives, mental associations and developing habits .

This final post in the series is a follow up to 7 Tips to Easy Health and provides you with some hands-on, get-down-and-dirty suggestions that will help you make healthy living easy. The following 15 practical tips will have your body singing the right tune so it’ll be easier to develop your healthy lifestyle:

1. Get optimal sleep. Our bodies and brains need rest so that they can busy themselves with other work. You see, during the day we’re so busy sensing the world and living our lives that we don’t have the capacity to do much else. Being unconscious shuts down our senses and allows our brains to process the information and our bodies to heal. It is extremely important to get the right amount of sleep for your body to function effectively.
2. Get up at the same time every morning (or close to it). This tip helps you achieve the first one because, really, how do you know how much sleep your body really needs? Your body will tell you but you have to create the right listening conditions. By getting up at the same time every morning, you train your body to naturally rise at that hour. Some days you’ll need more sleep so at night, if you stay away from stimulating activities an hour within your regular bedtime, you’re sleepiness is the green light that you’re ready to hit the hay.

3. Drink lots of water . Our bodies are approximately 70% water and we need to be hydrated for proper functioning. Water is also instrumental in flushing out toxins and dead cells floating around, banging into and damaging our healthy cells and organs. We can survive an amazingly long time without food but water and sleep are the two main ingredients keeping us alive! Keep yourself lubed up with water and stay well rested for a simple recipe that’ll help you tackle any problem life throws at you.

4. Use one day of the weekend to grocery shop. This is a healthy eating tip. You’re less likely to snack on crap or buy take-out if you have a stocked kitchen full of healthy, tasty treats and ready-made, nutritious meals.

5. Use the other day of the weekend to make lunches and/or dinners for the week. Between the previous tip and this one, I’ve been able to maintain healthy eating practices fairly consistently for over a year – and lost 45 lbs doing it! I usually plan a couple of dishes to make on Sunday, portion them out, keep what we’ll use during the week in the fridge, and freeze the rest. If you’re able to keep up the pace, you’ll find you’ve got a stock pile of meals in the freezer so when you don’t have time one week to prepare meals, then no worries!

6. Cheat a little. You’re always looking for that sweet spot in your healthy lifestyle , right? This means you can cheat a little. I usually use Friday as my cheat day and it’s been working for me. Try to choose the healthiest alternative that will still give you satisfaction. However, when you’re first forming your healthy habits, if you find you’re going all hog-wild when you cheat, then cut it out! At least for awhile until you’ve lost the weight you want or until you’re leading a fairly regular, healthy lifestyle that’s so ingrained you’re unlikely to slip into old habits.

7. Eat the right amount of food. Dr. Oz and Dr. Roizen, authors of the YOU book series and realage.com , compare our fuel and waste systems to that of an automobile. Without going into too much detail (it’ll be a future post), when our bodies use fuel (food), there are natural bi-products (waste). On the cellular level, these are called free radicals, which cause cellular damage and most often results in cancer.When we eat the right amount of food (slightly below what we need to function), our bodies turn to our fat stores for fuel. Fat combustion is a far more efficient fuel (which means less waste and oxidative damage) than the glucose that comes from our digestion. So here is an example of how overeating can cause a whole whack more problems than just a little extra poundage around the middle!
   
8. Make exercise an excuse . At one time the human race was extremely active. Our ancestors fought everyday to stay alive: spearheading fish, bending to pick herbs, reaching up for fruit, tackling saber tooth tigers… Our bodies are designed to be active and exercise is absolutely necessary to our total health. So why fight it? Try making exercise an excuse! How about an excuse to spend time with family, like ice skating or playing Frisbee in the park? Make it an excuse to get things done, like laundry or house cleaning. Or why not spend that time having fun like being active in dance, martial arts, sports or the best one of all, sex?
9. Relax. Our bodies and brains need rest to heal. We put them through a lot during the day and while sleep is a daily restorative state, it usually isn’t enough. Putting aside some extra time a day to really relax, which means to knock out as much sensory stimulation as possible, will do wonders for your energy levels. There are probably 101 ways to relax (hey, that sounds like a future post to me). But here are a few to get you started: meditate, get out in nature, stroke your pet (unless you have a goldfish), take a bath, just sit quietly or try a glass of wine.
10. Keep a fairly regular routine. When I was younger (and could afford to live a carefree life) I had balked at the restraints of routine. But since adopting healthy living practices, I’ve found routine a must in developing healthy habits and helpful in maintaining it. At first, I was extremely protective of my routine, At this point, though, I have no worries if my routine gets mussed up – I love my new healthy lifestyle and will never go back to my old ways.
11. Hook up with some support. Almost every weight-loss and health program stresses the importance of getting a buddy to help keep you motivated and stubborn in your pursuits. When you’re the only one you’ll disappoint, it’s easy to give up; but if you make yourself accountable to others, you’ll do your best to avoid the embarrassment of not keeping your word. For some people, social support keeps you honest and makes you try harder to achieve your goals. Use the help of social networks dedicated to achieving health, like Live Lighter (and our Facebook group), Weight Watchers or SparkPeople .
12. Laugh. Let’s see, where should I start? Laughter is not only great for building core muscles but it’s a great stress reliever, burns tons of calories, increases mood…basically, the benefits of laughter have been shown to have positive effects on the mind, body, emotional and social well-being. Laugh hard and deep so you can live long and be young.
13. Be love. Yesterday’s Valentine’s post tooted the benefits of freely giving and accepting love. Probably the most important person to love, however, is YOU. When you love yourself, you can forgive yourself for not being perfect. So when you goof up (and you most definitely will), you can accept your human faults, focus on how far you have come and get right back on the healthy living wagon.
14. Express all your emotions in healthy ways. When I was transforming from my former self to me now, I shed more than just weight. Achieving health catapults you into a different perspective and you’ll find that you’ll arrive at answers to questions you never even realized you had! There were a lot of issues that came up for me while I was getting healthy and some days were fairly emotional. Get it all out – expressing your emotions in a healthy way (i.e. you’re not hurting yourself or others) eases tensions and clears the mind so you can move forward and experience even more change.
15. Get organized. When my environment is organized, I feel organized in my mind. If my surroundings are cluttered, forget it – I’m stressed, a basket case. Over the past 5 years, every Spring I’ve been slowly whittling away at my junk that I’ve been accumulating throughout my life. And every year I’ve been banishing my emotional attachments to “my stuff”. I am positive that this is the jackpot year where I’ll declutter like nobody’s business. One of my favourite bloggers, Leo from Zen Habits , is all about simplifying life through organization .

These 15 practical tips helped me develop healthy habits and have allowed me to continue living a healthy lifestyle. I hope they do the same for you. Do you have any tips that make it easier to be healthy? Let us know by leaving a comment and if you found this post informative or entertaining, please vote for me on Digg or Stumbleupon.

As the final post to the Health Made Easy Series, I want to thank you for coming back over the past week and a half. Thank you for your regular reading and I’d appreciate any feedback you can offer so the next series can be even better.

We interrupt this Health Made Easy Series for some very serious health humour.

Healthy living is making the most healthful choices; that is, you try to weigh the potential health benefits and risks against each other for every decision you make.

I’d count it towards a healthful activity! A few of those, done slowly and with proper form ? For sure!

The last post in the Live Lighter’s Health Made Easy Series revealed the secret to making healthy living easy . This post shares with you some suggestions which apply this secret approach to health. They will help you make your healthy choices a regular part of your new healthy lifestyle:

1. Take it easy on yourself! If your goal is to be healthy, then there’s no pressure. You don’t have to push yourself to lose weight or fit into that size 6 dress that’s been hanging in the closet for 3 years. Go at your own pace and don’t get discouraged. Keep trying and have faith that you will get where you want to in your own good time.
   
2. Enjoy whatever you do. You know the basics: your body needs to avoid poisons whenever possible and have an optimal amount of good quality fuel, sleep, relaxation, water, air, and social and physical activity. Take this knowledge and do whatever you need to do to make the healthiest choice possible that will still give you pleasure. By doing this, you won’t be making sacrifices to make healthy living a habit.
3. Baby Steps. Change is difficult for many people and the transition stage is fragile at best. You’re going against instinct at this point and resistance is natural. People find excuses NOT to change, even though logically they know something needs to change. Set low goals to accomplish and with every success, both your habituation and self-confidence get stronger and it becomes easier to surpass the next level.
4. Only YOU know your limitations. While you want to be open to reaching your full potential, everyone has real physical limitations. Pushing yourself past these limitations will not only hurt you physically, they will shatter your self-confidence, too. In the long run, I believe going easy on yourself for the first while is more important than meeting your long-term goals.
5. Keep an open mind when others suggest your potential is greater than you think. Many people benefit from a personal trainer because almost everyone underestimates their capabilities. “If you think you can’t, you won’t.” So allow others to challenge your current beliefs so that you can overcome those ideas about yourself – the ones that may be holding you back from reaching your goals.
6. Cheat a little. If you’ve made ½ an hour of daily exercise a goal for yourself, consider counting some of your daily activities towards that goal. For instance, laundry and cleaning are extremely physical, as well as the 10 minute walk to the subway station and the stairs you decide to take rather than the escalator. When you’re ready for it, you can make these activities more of a challenge by applying these 7 tips to making the most out of your workout time .
7. Be good to your body. You know what makes you feel bad. For me, it’s drinking too much, overeating, smoking, not getting enough sleep, certain processed foods…actually there’s quite a list. In any case, I continue to learn what my body needs so that I can live a vibrant and full life so that my life can run more smoothly on a regular basis.

I hope these 7 tips to easy health are as helpful to you in developing your healthy living practices as they were for me. They are fairly general so you can try them out on all your healthy living choices.

Stay tuned in the next few days for the last post in the Health Made Easy Series for 15 practical and easy health tips.

Like many people, you probably believe that getting healthy is hard. This article is intended to challenge those beliefs, and will describe why your current beliefs about health may be the very thing holding you back from getting healthy. AND this article will explain why it is absolutely integral to your success that you MAKE being healthy easy.

To make this secret work for you, you have to know a little about learned (or habitual) behaviour and evolution. In the game of life, the goal is always survival. As living organisms, we instinctually (that is, without total awareness or thinking) seek out means of life support (offense maneuver) so that we can keep all our senses alert for danger (defense measure).

So, you see, nature has made it easy for us to behave without conscious thought . We are naturally attracted to substances and activities which promote survival and we react negatively to whatever threatens our survival.

How did nature provide us a way to sense the difference between the two? Our feelings! Our emotional barometers tell us through pleasure that we’ve encountered something which supports life and the alarm for danger comes in the form of negative feelings, thoughts or physical reactions. Instinct is what has preserved the human species.

But in a developed society, life becomes more complicated than simply surviving. While our modern lifestyles and man-made conveniences give us extreme pleasure, many of them are completely unnatural with various consequences to the natural order of life. They interfere with our total health, impeding our biological functioning in almost imperceptible ways. Over time, and along with natural aging, the damage accumulates. A nudge into a telephone pole with your car won’t leave much of a dent, but keep nudging a thousand times over in that general area and boy, what a hole!

So while our instincts were meant to help us develop habits that promote health, many us we have instead learned unconscious behaviour that affects the smooth operations of our biological machine and expedites the aging process . We have to break the habits that are harming us and replace them with habits that promote health. The following secret will allow you to use your natural instincts to help you not only survive longer, but enjoy every minute of it.

The Secret

Bottom line: The secret to making healthy living easy is to find the pleasure in healthy alternatives.

Health is easy when you make it easy. When I was having trouble maintaining healthy habits and choices, I thought the harder I tried and the more sacrifice I made, the better and faster my results would be. But when I tried too hard, I pushed past my limits and ended up making it into an unpleasant experience, which we now know activates our instincts and we react negatively to it. And what did I do? Forget health, even though I knew (logically) it was better for me, and continue my highly pleasurable but harmful habits.

But I didn’t give up my quest for health because I believed in the benefits of health . I’ve experienced it before – when I was younger! What I I did give up on was my approach to health. I abandoned trying so hard to be perfect at healthy living and just tried to live the most healthful way I could at the time. When I started enjoying my healthy choices, they naturally became habits. After awhile I started noticing, along with others, that my healthy choices turned into a healthy lifestyle!

The Critical Point Approach

I read a few books that helped me change my beliefs about health . One of which, Power vs. Force by Dr. David Hawkins, drove it home for me that by making getting healthy easy, I was actually being more effective:

“Critical point analysis is a technique derived from the fact that in highly complex systems there is a specific, critical point at which the smallest input will result in the greatest change. ”

Hawkins gives an example of this “natural law” with the fact that you can cripple a large locomotive by knowing the exact spot to apply pressure. But it rang a bell for me because this is essentially what I did to make getting healthy easy!

For instance, the human body can be thought of as a “highly complex system” and “Input” in this case would then mean whatever you need to run your biological machine. It could also mean that there’s an optimal amount of this input that “will result in the greatest change” towards a natural state of being, i.e. optimal functioning or total health .

The Implications and a New Paradigm for Health

If you apply this idea of a critical point to the body, then getting healthy requires practically no effort except for what the individual is capable of doing at any given time. In effect, you’re looking for the sweet spot in the level of effort you use to achieve health, as well as the quality and the amount of the food, water, sleep and exercise you need to optimally run your biological machine.

You’re looking for the critical point where it requires the least amount of input to result in the greatest change.

Finding the Elusive Sweet Spot

How will you know when you’ve reached the sweet spot so you can get maximum benefits from your healthy efforts? Your instinctual emotional barometer!

Your sweet spot is the point of your enjoyment within your healthy choice and your level of satisfaction afterwards. This means that no matter what you do to achieve health, as long as you make the most healthful and pleasing choice available to you at the time, then you’re being most efficient with your time.

You are actually getting the full benefits of your healthy choice!

This concept of a critical point is how I made getting healthy easy. With this knowledge, as well as some about how the body works, getting healthy for me took absolutely no willpower. All I did was look for the sweet spot in everything I did.

By choosing to approach healthy living this way, it means that I make my choices based on 2 things:

1) do I enjoy this?

2) Is this healthy for me?

Living a healthy lifestyle based on the critical point analysis concept allows for individuality. It also allows for the idea that for every healthy choice you make, the level of your pleasure indicates your efficiency level. The bonus to all this is that repeated, pleasing behaviour is habit forming and quickly becomes subconscious behaviour.

So I ask you: can the secret to making healthy living easy, really be to simply enjoy our healthy lifestyle choices?

If you’re left wondering how to go about finding your sweet spot, read this Live Lighter post: How to Use the Secret to Making Healthy Living Easy.

This is the first post in Live Lighter’s Health Made Easy Series and it’s meant to ease you into the idea that maybe healthy living can be easy.

If you’re like most people, say the words, “healthy living” and your brow furrows as you imagine the sweating, extra baggage, extra showers, time, money, lettuce-based meals, hunger, guilt, suffering…well, no wonder you don’t want anything to do with a healthy lifestyle!

It doesn’t have to be that way. Check back in two days to hear about the secret to making healthy living easy . To help prepare you for the mind-bending suggestions in the following posts, please watch this introductory, 2 minute video on quick and easy health tips:

There is a misconception out there that getting healthy needs to be difficult. While I’ve experienced difficulty in getting healthy, over the years I’ve learned how to make it work for me so I can enjoy living a healthy lifestyle …and all the benefits that come along with it.

In my experience , life is easier and more enjoyable when you have total health . If l could show you that healthy living was easy, would you try some of the suggestions out for yourself?

If you want to know how I made getting healthy easy, then you’ll want to read the next 5 posts. The following articles will make up the Live Lighter’s Health Made Easy Series :

1. Quick and Easy Healthy Living Tips Video – February 7^th
2. The Secret to Making Healthy Living Easy – February 9^th
3. 7 Tips to Make Healthy Living Easy – February 11^th
4. Easy Health Humour – February 13^th
5. 15 Practical Tips to Make Healthy Living Easy – February 15^th

This series is designed to convince you that it is possible to make healthy living easy. It will get you thinking and maybe even get you up off the couch!

You can subscribe to the Live Lighter feed or keep coming back to find out how easy health can be!