Healthy Habits: 11 Healthy Habits Your Kids Should Pick (Himalayan Times)

Healthy Habits: 11 Healthy Habits Your Kids Should Pick (Himalayan Times)

Healthy Habits: 11 Healthy Habits Your Kids Should Pick (Himalayan Times)

Most parents do more of just feeding, clothing and housing their kids and do less of teaching them good habits be it healthy habits, moral habits or otherwise. Kids easily pick up habits during their formative years of childhood. Don't be surprised when they pick more of what you do than what you say, if they are two different things. Here is list of premium picked 11 healthy habits parents should teach their kids.

Also Read: Parenting And Healthy Foods: Parents Send Kids Back To School With Healthy Meals And Snacks

As a parent you are the most important influence in your child’s life. A new born baby is like ‘clay’ in the hands of the parent, who is the potter. What shape the child’s life takes depends on how the ‘clay’ is shaped by the potter.

You are responsible for the habits your child forms. The foundation of your child’s future is laid by the habits that you help them develop during the formative years of childhood.

You pass your genes to your child. Children pick up your habits too — both good as well as bad. Show that you care about your child by inculcating healthy habits in yourself as well as  your child.

1. Fruits and Vegetables
• Children should have at least five servings of fruits and vegetables every day.

• Parents should make an effort to incorporate a range of fruits and vegetables of different hues in their child’s meals — from red, blue, orange to yellow, green and white.

• Eating colourful food is not only fun but gives a range of nutrients to your child.

2. No Skipping Breakfast
• Teach your child that a healthy breakfast is the most important meal of the day as it not only kicks starts our brain and metabolism but helps in weight maintenance and keeping chronic diseases at bay.

• Hearty and healthy breakfast is possible when dinners are light and early — 6.30 to 7.00 pm the night before.

3: Eat Every 2-3 Hours
• Research has shown that having small meals every two to three hours is healthier than having three big meals a day. Most day schools give food breaks to children every three hours, so pack two lunch boxes for your child instead of one. Serve him small frequent meals at fixed times.

4: Dental Hygiene
• Ensure your child brushes his teeth twice a day — after breakfast and before retiring to bed for the night. Children also need to be helped with brushing and need to be taught the right up-down movement of  the brush.

• Ensure that they gargle after every meal. A fun way is to ask them to gargle as per their age — if they are three years old, then three times after every meal.

• You must get regular dental checkups done for your child — once every six months.

5: Drink Water
• Seventy per cent of our body is made of water, so you should ensure that your child has at least eight glasses of water per day.

• Besides removing toxins from the body and making the brain alert, drinking water has innumerable health benefits.

6: Sleep For 9 Hours
• Ensure that your child has rested well so that he can function to the optimum level. Minimum nine hours every night.

• Having fixed bed time routine helps.

7: Read Books
• Reading is to the mind, what exercise is to the body. So, have a DEAR (Drop everything and read) time with your dear child every day. During this time you should either read aloud to your child or you both should read separately and discuss what is being read.

• Even if you start with as little as 20 minutes per day, it will go a long way in helping your child develop higher order thinking skills, vocabulary and communication skills.

• As per the American Academy of Pediatrics, daily reading lays the foundation to the child’s academic success. Reading aloud age appropriate books to children should begin at six months of age.

8: Physical Exercise
• Ensure that your children are first exposed to as many sports as possible — tennis, swimming, cricket, athletics, karate et cetera.Then choose one or two which they like and encourage them to play it regularly for the fun of it and not as a part of preparing for some competition. They should play the sport at least three to four times a week.

• It may take some time before the children to decide which sport they really like, so do not give up easily.

• You can just take them to the park and play with them or arrange for the neighbours’ children to play with yours.

• You will have to restrict screen time to ensure that children derive pleasure from sports as well as reading.

9: Gratitude
• Train your child to be grateful. Gratitude improves your child’s health, relationships, emotions, personality and career.

• Grateful children score better in exams, are more energetic, happier, have stronger relationships, healthier, kinder, sleep better, exercise more, more spiritual, less materialistic, less envious, and have better self esteem.

10: Positive thinking
• Children can get easily discouraged with the challenges they face. It is important to make them realise that they are lovable, capable and unique, no matter what situation they are in.

• Optimism or seeing the brighter side of life is a trait which is a learned one.

• No child is born optimistic. You have to train them by helping them focus on the ‘positive’ in life. They should be prepared for the worst but hope for the best.

• Ask your children to write statements about what they want to change about the way they see themselves or the world around them. Put them in places where they can see it every day, such as the bathroom mirror, closet, bedroom wall. Example of some affirmations can be ‘I can do whatever I focus my mind on’, ‘I am intelligent’, ‘Learning is fun’.

11: Spend Time With Family And Friends

• Money is a very important commodity in our life as it makes our lives comfortable and gives us opportunities to grow. However, true happiness is achieved only by having warm fulfilling relationships.

• No matter what toys you get for your child, they can never substitute for the time you spend with them.

• For your children to have your ‘memories’ later, you need to spend time in their ‘now’ to create them.

• Make it a point to have at least one meal ‘family meal’ everyday where all members of the family are present. The family that eats together stays together.

• Encourage your child to develop a range of friendships during school years by encouraging play dates. School day friendships will teach them life skills such as cooperation, sharing, getting along, conflict resolution, problem solving. It will set them up with life skills they can draw from years to come.


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Bad Habits: Effective Tips On How to Break Up With Your Bad Habits (Business 2 Community)

Bad Habits: Effective Tips On How to Break Up With Your Bad Habits (Business 2 Community)

Bad Habits: Effective Tips On How to Break Up With Your Bad Habits (Business 2 Community)

Change is hard some say. Some people are so used to old lifestyle or bad habits whether its unhealthy or detrimental to your finance, marriage, career etc that making a healthy-habit change becomes a very difficult mission.

Also Read: Healthy Habits: How To Make Lasting Healthy Habit Change

Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.

Warren Buffett

Do you feel that some of your habits are holding you back from experiencing the successful life you desire? Your habit may be as small as biting your nails or buying expensive lattes every single day. At the other end of the spectrum, you may want to break free of smoking, extreme anger, excessive eating, or some other detrimental habits. Here are a few tips that can help you put an end to those pesky practice once and for all.

1. Find Your “WHY.” 

Determine why you should stop. Think about how your may be hurting you and/ or others. Is it detrimental to your health? Screwing up your appearance? Putting a dent in your wallet? Does it make you act irrationally? Does it hurt your loved ones? Sit down and make a list of the benefits that you will experiencewhen you do put an end to this habit once and for all.

If you can find no compelling reason to stop, then the chances are high that you will be less willing to work toward quitting. Find a reason to stop the progression of your habit and hammer that thought into your mind each time you feel compelled to continue with it.

2. Get a Carrot

Of course, when there is a direct reward at the end of your journey, you will be much more inclined to give a wholehearted effort. Indulge in a trip to the spa, get a new outfit for work or make a trip to your favorite restaurant each time you reach a large milestone.

Ensure that your reward is not connected to the habit your are trying to stop. If, for instance, you are trying to quit smoking, it would make no sense, and be detrimental to reward yourself with a cigarette at the end of each week for “being good.”

Save the largest rewards for last. What do you want the most? What is something you have wished you could purchase or experience for a long time? Spend the time you would normally spend indulging in your habit to plan your pot of gold at the end of this rainbow.

And, the reward should be in line with the complexity of your task. Rewarding yourself with a cruise to the Bahamas because you stopped biting your nails would be a bit of a stretch. But, rewarding yourself with a massage at the spa might be more rational.

3. Read About Success

Get a book or browse the web to read success stories of those that have previously been where you now find yourself, and were able to conquer the same habit. Being able to see social proof that others have been able to achieve the task you are now facing makes the pursuit seem tremendously more manageable.

4. Baby Steps

Focus on only one small step each week to ensure long lasting results. For example, if you are working at losing weight, you might want to eliminate sweets from your diet for the first week. The next week eliminate some of the other carbohydrates, like white bread, in addition to the sweets.

That old childhood adage, “slow and steady win the race” is true. Crash diets will not work, and quitting anything cold turkey will often lead to some other compensatory behavior. This is one reason that most people who are quitting smoking gain weight. They have the need to fix an oral fixation. And if the compensatory habit is just as much of an issue as the one that you are trying to break, then this will grind your progress to a halt and you will have to start all over again at step one.

Have measurable goals. What does that mean? If you are trying to minimize your spending, determine the average amount you spend each week in unnecessary purchases, like your daily latte fix, for example. Then set a goal to reduce that amount by 10% for the first week.

Habits provide you with a level of comfort that everything in your world is okay. They serve to give you a feeling of control over your circumstances. However, a dependency on a routine that has negative consequences or is detrimental to your physical and mental health can be replaced by choices that will fuel your success instead.

Remember that you are the boss of your mind, body, and soul. Embark on the road to breaking up with your bad habit today and prove to yourself just how much stronger you are than it is!

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Healthy Habit: How To Make Lasting Healthy Habit Change

Healthy Habit: How To Make Lasting Healthy Habit Change

Healthy Habit: How To Make Lasting Healthy Habit Change by Amanda Deverich

Some say change is hard. Quitting smoking, dieting, exercising and even flossing regularly are health-habit changes that can be hard to make. Learned helplessness studies show the reason people do not succeed is that they attempt change in ways they think should work, but don't. Logic tells people facts and fear should inspire and motivate people to change. Sometimes this is true, however, motivation is often lost due to the fundamental belief that it won't really work this time because it never has in the past.

Information alone is not enough to change behavior. Knowing the health implication or health benefits of habit change is not enough motivator. Sometimes people do act on the knowledge they have and others do not. There is a word for the illogical failure to act upon knowledge: akrasia. Akrasia is a Greek term for knowing we should do one thing, yet we do another. I know if I eat that extra slice of pizza I will not lose the weight I would like to lose. Knowing this fact and knowing I should act in accordance is not enough for me to choose not to overeat. Relying on information alone to spark healthy habit changes is insufficient for many people.

Who Do You Fear

Fear of consequences is not a perfect motivator. There is a true saying that nothing happens until the pain of staying the same outweighs the pain of change. The consequences of not changing gets some people to change, but not all. Some people remain unchanging in painful situations. They are frozen in fear. They deflect the anxiety of the problem by ignoring, minimizing or making fun of it. "I'll go out in a massive heart attack rather than spend years doing crunches and eating cardboard food!" People are well aware that the ultimate risk of smoking or not losing weight is death. Yet, the fear of death is too overwhelming to act upon. Some people internally panic and go into flight-or-freeze mode. They must make death a remote possibility. People thwart change by suppressing anxiety which would otherwise move them to act.

Must Read: Best 5 Healthy Foods That Help Fight Sugar Cravings

Finally, some people do not change habits because they are resigned. They believe they are doomed. No matter what efforts they make, they believe they will not be able to change. They suffer from learned helplessness, a condition where they believe they have tried everything and that nothing will work, even if they do try. This is a false belief. To alleviate the frustration, they disown their true desire to better themselves and as a result become depressed, angry, or outright self-destructive. Sadly, many medical professionals also believe people will not change. Too many times they have seen patients fail to make the effort to instill new health habits. They, too, can lose faith and hope in their clients. Medical professionals ethically dispense the tools and advice with little confidence it will actually be used and applied.

Information, fear of death and feigned hope cannot inspire people to change. There is a way to overcome the akrasia, the frozen overwhelm and the learned helplessness. The catalysts for growth are relationship, hope and ongoing repetition of doing what works.

Relationships can be found in groups or with individuals. Being part of a group has powerful benefits. A group provides a behavioral standard and support. Groups have a culture and a spirit that helps shape its members. In its positive form, this culture can help people make changes by offering support, expectation, encouragement and accountability. Formal healthy-habit groups may be focused on weight loss, exercise, quitting smoking, recovery or other lifestyle change effort. Informal groups such as friends, family, school, work or church can also be very effective. The key is that there is a positive culture of sustained change. If you want to be a non-smoker, hang around non-smokers. If you want to be a runner, hang around runners. 

Must Read: Most Essential Health Benefits Gained From Running Regular

We need our small wins validated and celebrated -- even if it is in a quiet way. We need someone to actually care that we did not go to the gym that day and who knows how to listen, encourage and believe we will get back in the swing and go tomorrow. Individuals can also be powerful change motivators and sustainers. Finding a guru to lead you is a good idea. A guru is someone with knowledge and charisma. A guru exudes confidence in their methods and that the method can work for you. This can be a fitness guru, a spiritual guru, habit change guru, a parent or friend or an accountability partner.

Groups and gurus can instill hope. They are living models that change can be made and they care about you. When we rely solely on ourselves and our long-standing history of bad health habits, we have no framework, no evidence to believe change is possible. We must chose relationships with others that offer hope. If some of the very medical professionals who are supposed to be able to help us are hopeless that we will change, why should we try? After all, they know more than we. We need someone who evangelizes. We need someone that can lead us on the path that will pay off if only we keep trying. Hope is a powerful motivator. Hope gives energy to try again, to believe that what we are doing actually is going to make a difference in our life.

How Do I Stay Physically Fit With No Motivation To Exercise

Hope is sustained with results. Results come from a method that works. When you suffer from learned helplessness, believing you have tried everything, you need someone to show you what you haven't tried. You have a false belief that no matter what you try it will not work. If your current method does not work, get another method. There are many ways to diet and exercise that work. The trick is to pick one that gets results, that has a culture, group or guru and to keep applying the method. Make a plan and measure progress. Do not be dissuaded by small steps forward followed by failure.

Examine and identify where you may have went wrong. Reapply. Get more information. Repetition is important. Repetition not only instills the method, but moves you closer to results. It also compensates for the days you lose hope or fall off the regimen. If you plan to floss every day and only floss to five days, you are far better off than zero. You have begun to change your habit. Repeat your process the next week, stick with it using accountability and family support. Your wife, dentist and self will love you for it! Over time, a new habit will take root.

Change is a process, not a moment of transfiguration. At first, change takes focused attention to become a habit. Be purposeful, get relational support, identify methods that work and continually apply the strategies. Once a habit is formed, it will give the budding change momentum and add a helpful inertia that makes it easier and easier to maintain the change. Soon then, the change will take root, transforming into a healthier, new you.

Culled from Huffingtonpost

Habit is easier to form than to deform. Instead of spending the rest of one's life trying to change a bad habit, it will be much better if the good habits are formed from the start. But this is usually easier said than done. If you read this article "how to make lasting healthy habit change" start to finish, I'm sure it has strengthened your resolve for a lasting healthy behavioural change if that is your goal.

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