Change is in the air with everything from the weather to daily routines changing for the approaching fall season. With the cooler temperatures, holidays just around the corner, and the hustle and bustle of a new school year, it’s easy for healthy habits to fall to the wayside.

However, the ways in which we spend the first few weeks of the new season sets the tone for the rest of the year. When going through times of transition like this, it’s more important than ever to build a framework of healthy habits for the new season. 

Recognizing that you’d like to add new habits to your routine is just one step along the path though. For the best chance of long-term retention and success, it’s best to approach the process with the following four-steps.

Habits are best supported through action and supportive tools. While the former is up to the individual to follow through with, for the latter, a quick visit to your local Community Pharmacy location can help put healthy supplements in your hands.

 

Set Goals for Your Healthy Habit 

Before enacting any sweeping changes to your daily routine, it can be helpful to take a step back and look at your current habit structure.

Assess what areas of your life are humming along without issue, and then which areas seem to be lagging a bit behind. This second category is where new healthy habits can come to the rescue. Once you know the general need or area in life in which you’d like to improve, then it’s just a matter of setting ambitious—but attainable—goals that will get you there.

Setting a goal gives you a destination, something to refer back to when you are making choices in your daily life.

For example, if you decide that you’d like to lose weight while retaining muscle mass, then the goal might be two-fold. With the weight loss goal, a simple target end weight can be a useful measurement for progress. Adjust your diet and physical activity, and record how this figure fluctuates over time.

To ensure you are pursuing this goal without sacrificing strength though, a weekly check-in on foundational weight-lifts like bench press, squats, and deadlifts will let you know how your body’s muscles are reacting to the change. 

With the needs and goals firmly affixed in your mind, the game for setting healthy habits then becomes to create a system that supports and nurtures your growth.

 

Create a System of Healthy Habits

While setting goals and doing activities like regularly lifting weights, doing cardiovascular exercise, or playing sports certainly contribute to healthy habits, it’s the creation of an overall system that helps people take up habits that stick.

Two of the most overlooked aspects of healthy habits are rest and digestion, as both set the foundation upon which all the more active pursuits are built. 

Along with an active lifestyle, healthy habits are best supported by systems rooted in scientifically-backed nutrition. We’ve partnered with Ideal Protein and their program provides all the key ingredients a body needs to function at a high level and help form healthy habits. Giving your body consistent meals that provide essential protein and other bodies means you have the right fuel to keep up with your new habits.

At the end of the day, one of the best things you can give your body is quality sleep. Science has consistently shown that sleep doesn’t just make us happier, but that quality rest is a prerequisite to learning and keeping to new habit patterns.

While we are awake, our bodies fuel action with what we consume at meals and throughout the day. One cannot expect to make lasting and high-quality changes if the ingredients on hand are low quality and disruptive to the bodily system.

Make Healthy Habits Easy

Once you have the goals and systems in place, it’s time to reorient the little things in your life to keep these new routines within reach each day.

Making healthy habits easy means putting items that will likely prompt positive action in the spaces you frequent. This could mean having your running shoes with fresh socks near the door, your morning supplements laid out on the kitchen table, or keeping your phone out of arm’s reach from your bed. All of these actions queue up the day to stay consistent with goals.

Little organizational tips like these can be just the little push or pull in the direction of the habits we choose to build. By making your home, workspace, and any other area you frequent built in this manner, it’s far easier to fall into a consistent pattern of following healthy habits.

 

Be Consistent with New Healthy Habits

With everything else in place, all that remains to solidify new healthy habits is good old fashion consistency. There’s nothing glamorous about this aspect, no new pieces to tweak or fidget, but simply staying the course will yield powerful, positive results.

The popular adage is that forming a habit takes about three weeks to form, and while this might vary from individual to individual and depend on the activity, it’s a solid rule of thumb to follow. Three weeks can help set or break new patterns, and certainly, after two months a sense of normalcy starts to come with the new routine.

Once these new healthy habit behaviors become normalized within your overall life routine, they become easier to follow. Perhaps more importantly, their absence will also be more notably missed. Establishing a new norm is like paving a new road for yourself throughout the day, you subconsciously will find it easier and easier to repeat the familiar choices each time.

Making healthy habits a goal for fall sets the table for you to succeed. For those looking to make the most of perhaps the most beautiful times of the year, this kind of upfront work will be rewarded with more energy, better sleep, or any other goal you identify as important in your life.

If you ever should have questions about what products or routines might best support your upcoming fall goals, then visit or call your local Community Pharmacy with your questions.