Healthy Living

I love the fact that my header image for this post entitled “Healthy Living” has our “bar” behind it! Despite not being a big drinker – ie. barely drinking at all – we have several bottles of spirits around the house! I’ll never have more than a glass of wine if we go out, but I like to have a Baileys, a cocktail or a gin & tonic at home, plus the bottles look super pretty! But anyway, I guess that’s kind of the point of this post – healthy living isn’t about being the fittest or eating the cleanest of everyone, but making sure that you have balance in your life. If I only ever ate super healthy “clean” food and exercised to excess (ha! Not going to be happening to me any time soon!), I would end up feeling consumed by it all and stressed out, and that’s not healthy living, is it?!

In our house, we tend to vary with our healthy eating – we can get into bad habits and get stuck in them for a while then have a big effort on having more fruit and veg in our diets, then end up back on the crisps and chocolate again! I think it doesn’t help that it’s winter at the moment and all I want to eat is rubbish food and I don’t want to leave the house to exercise more than is necessary, but I saw a few tips in this video on how even just the layout of your house and kitchen can help you to be more healthy with your choices:

We don’t currently even have a fruitbowl right now, which I’m blaming for the lack of fruit eating in our house now! The problem is that we always forget to eat it as it’s out of sight in our dining room, then it goes mouldy! BUT I did have a major fruit smoothie this morning, as pictured, so I’m feeling pretty good about that 😀 I used to eat a lot of fruit, especially when I was at school and uni, but nowadays I mostly just have a banana at work. I read this piece in the Daily Mail about fruitarians though and think that’s going a little too far!
Confession time though! The video recommends eating at a dining table to avoid distractions which cause mindless eating – well, at the moment our dining table is an office…my new overlocker took over the computer space upstairs, so the computer has moved downstairs! It is handy though as we left our Mac in the Peak District, oops! I am very prone to mindless eating though – when I’m watching TV, I like to have something to do, so if I’m not reading or sewing or typing at the same time, I’ll want to eat something – I need to work on it!
We do eat a lot of veg with our meals, or at least we try to! We’ve taken to swapping normal chips for carrot or celeriac chips which are really yummy, and we make them in our Actifry so they’ve got less oil and are a bit healthier – a small step, but it’s those things that make the difference!

I’m not a big breakfast eater – in fact, I don’t tend to eat it at all unless we’ve got a lazy morning so I don’t need to eat straightaway. I just don’t like to eat first thing in the morning! Normally I have a banana mid-morning at work as breakfast but I’m trying to get in the habit of having yoghurt with granola – my friend Rosie gave us an awesome recipe that I want to try that doesn’t use refined sugar, so I’m excited to try that! Above is one of my weekend breakfasts of fluffy pancakes with blueberries & lemon butter – this was SO yummy and a little bit healthy, at least it had fruit in! It’s based on the breakfast we had at Rick Stein’s – I might do our recipe sometime actually.

In terms of exercise, I’m feeling pretty good about myself right now! I haven’t been on my gym workouts as much recently, but I’ve been working really hard on my yoga. I do yoga at work every day that I can manage it, which is pretty much every day, stretch when I’m watching TV to work on my flexibility and have completed the 30 days of yoga.
I’ve found that my flexibility has improved SO much! I wish I’d taken photos beforehand because I was a good 6 inches off reaching my toes in a forward fold and my back was as rounded as a wheel in downward dog before – it’s now almost flat and I can touch my toes any time of day, even in jeans! My friends and family are sick of me showing them that I can do it!

Laura and I have actually started private yoga classes too once a fortnight so that we can learn more then practise on our own, which is where we properly learnt the Camel pose above – needs more work of course, as this was only my second go since learning it, but I’m feeling more confident with my poses every day. We’re also starting work on arm balances and I’m surprised to see my balance and strength is better than I thought it was.
I find that yoga isn’t just good for building my strength and fitness, but it also helps me mentally – I feel a lot less stressed or anxious on days when I do yoga and I’m starting to use yoga breathing techniques and stretches to calm myself if I ever get stressed. It’s helping me learn a lot more about my body too which is awesome. I can’t wait to get better and better at it!

How do you live healthily?