
Adopting healthy behaviours like eating nutritious foods and exercising can be a serious struggle in 2018 – when our lifestyles are increasingly geared towards being sedentary and consuming quick, easy, nutrient-poor food.
While many of us would like to improve our overall health, it’s far more difficult to do in practice. Especially when we’re routinely confronted with the most extreme representations of what ‘health’ actually is. Exercising seven days a week and eating solely organic, fresh produce just isn’t realistic for the average person, and it’s easy to become disheartened about our ability to stick to the picture-perfect version of health.
But the all-or-nothing approach to health is probably what’s holding a lot of us back. The little things that would make a difference – like getting an extra hour of sleep, or eating more vegetables, or walking more, are hard to maintain.
In particular, living an active lifestyle, with all the other demands of modern life, can seem overwhelming. Even though the World Health Organisation’s recommendations of 150 minutes of “moderate-intensity aerobic physical activity” per week (i.e. 20 minutes per day) seems achievable, it’s estimated that 65 per cent of Australians over the age of 15 are sedentary or have low levels of exercise.
So how can we integrate exercise into our lives in the long term?
We asked six women about how they made an exercise habit actually stick for good.