Sure, eating right and getting enough exercise will lessen your risk of heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. And doing so is likely to help you live longer. But is that all?
For many people, lessening the risk of disease or living longer is a rather boring, un-spectacular motivation for maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Because of habit, convenience, or laziness our lifestyle naturally deteriorates in an unhealthy direction. You can blame some of that on stress, media, environment, and more.
Understanding more of the “other” benefits of healthy living can help us find more of the motivation necessary to actually make those healthy lifestyle choices. Here are some of those benefits.
A healthy lifestyle will help you:
- Look better. Especially for women the vanity factor can be very motivating. Much beyond making a healthy weight more possible, a healthy lifestyle can do wonders for your skin, hair, and more. You’ll have less wrinkles, a brighter, clearer skin color, and shinier, healthier hair. Your eyes will be brighter. You may not even realize all the ways you look better.
- Handle stress better. Exercise, a healthy diet, and enough rest give you much greater internal resources for managing stress. Your brain needs oxygen, healthy nutrition, and rest. When your brain has those necessary elements, you’ll be surprised how much less normal stress bothers you.
- Think better. Your mental efficiency at work, your memory, your ability to learn, how alert you are to danger, your ability to make decisions – all that depends on brain function. And your brain works better when you live healthy.
- Feel happier. Feeling sluggish, tired, and bloated certainly can take the wind out of an otherwise beautiful day. All those healthy lifestyle habits help you feel better physically, which allows you to enjoy life more. And then there are those necessary substances that help your brain experience positive emotions: that comes from exercise and healthy food.
- Love better. Yes, it’s true! Your sex life will be better if you feel better physically and are less stressed. And that’s not to mention that with more energy and a more radiant glow you will be more attractive to someone else if you are single and looking. A healthier body allows the love juices to flow!
- Be more successful. You can translate the energy, mental clarity, clearer emotions, and ability to handle stress into better outward success in just about any endeavor. Of course with more success you may have to work harder to keep your healthy lifestyle habits going: busy-ness can sometimes undo all the good you’ve been working toward.
- Feel closer to God. A healthy lifestyle unclogs the physical brain waves God uses to communicate with us. And He honors us when we respect our body as His temple. Spiritual growth is both a great beginning motivation and a wonderful result of living healthy.
Appreciate the other benefits of living healthy. Who wouldn’t want to take advantage of all this good stuff?
Your turn: Has your healthy lifestyle led to other benefits? If you need to develop a healthier lifestyle, what would be a good motivator for you? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.
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