Making the right choices for your health on a daily basis can be expensive, daunting, and exhausting. As a result, many choose the inexpensive route of making poor health choices. While those small daily decisions on what you eat or how much you sleep may seem inconsequential at the moment as a single choice, the totality of these choices ultimately determines your overall state of health.
From avoiding disease and preventing accidents to stabilizing your mood, the benefits of making healthy choices are extensive. This makes them worth the financial investment. A new pair of athletic shoes, activewear, gym membership, and healthier grocery list all add up to spending money, but the payoff is worth the investment.
If you’re holding back on making the necessary changes to be healthier because money is tight, consider a small loan to cover the cost. That way you can buy what you need and pay the debt off over the span of a few weeks or months. Readers can click here to learn more about the benefits of this option.
Let’s look at some more areas where you can make simple changes and choices to be healthier.
1. Commitment to Adequate Rest
The average American works almost nine hours per day, which is around 25% more than European workers. Depending on your job, you may work even longer and more frequent hours or take your work home with you. You may even have a second job. All this is before even considering family, social, and household duties.
The above is a large factor in why statistics show nearly one-third of Americans are sleep deprived, which increases your risk for everything from obesity, diabetes and heart disease to accidents and depression.
Prioritizing sleep can often be a cost and time sacrifice by putting unfinished work down, following guidelines on when it’s time to purchase new pillows and mattresses, and creating a relaxing sleep environment. However, the long-term health costs of not getting adequate rest surpasses any of these short-term costs.
2. Commitment to Your Own Needs
Selflessness becomes a very negative thing when it sacrifices your own well-being. Frequent fliers know the drill of putting your own oxygen mask on before attempting to help anyone else in an emergency. This is because you’ll soon be incapacitated from helping anyone else if you don’t help yourself first.
Doing the things that help you in everyday life can be expensive and often get pushed aside to accommodate the needs of others. For example, studies have shown that 54 percent of American workers with access to paid time off opt to leave unused vacation days on the table each year because they feel too busy, overworked, or guilty to use them. Many parents cut out all their own discretionary activities in order to financially accommodate their children doing multiple extracurricular activities.
So, remember that considering your own interests and needs as too expensive puts your emotional, psychological, and physical health in jeopardy in ways that will eventually render you unable to help the very people you’re placing before yourself.
3. Commitment to Your Diet, Weight, and Exercise
High BMI and body weight lead to innumerable health complications, including stroke, diabetes, arthritis, cancer, and heart disease.
Yet, healthy food choices are typically more costly and time-consuming to identify and prepare than grab-and-go meals. Exercise is similar in that you have to learn what to do, make a commitment to do it regularly, and buy equipment and memberships. The totality of it is often overwhelming and expensive as a lifestyle, which makes it easy to push both aside.
Remember that small consecutive choices add up to big results. There are even plenty of ways that you can offset the cost of fitness and nutrition, such as choosing free water over expensive sodas, walking where you could be buying a ride, limiting alcohol, tobacco cessation savings, and so forth.
In closing, prioritizing the costs of your rest, personal needs, and fitness and nutrition is a good start to a healthier you. Use it as a building block to extend your choices and changes to any facet of life where a perceived notion of cost is holding you back from becoming the healthiest version of yourself.