5 Habits That Helped Me Lose 30lbs

I am a complete believer that habits dictate a good chunk of our lives. If you do little to no activity and eat junk all day long you probably are carrying some extra weight and find yourself being a little concerned that you had to catch your breath after going up only five steps. Don’t worry! Many of us, including myself, have been there before. Stopping bad habits, like drinking soda daily, can feel impossible to stop, but it can take less than a month to kill a bad habit or create new ones that can last a lifetime.

Changing up just one habit, say eating a healthy diet for example, can have a huge positive impact in our lives.

For myself I adopted five habits to help me with my weight loss journey.

One of the first habits I got into, and I’ve talked about this in previous posts, was food tracking! Its been almost a year since I started tracking my food intake regularly during the week. I’m no where near perfect at it but I’d say I’ve tracked 80% of my year. With the app I use to track my food I can set short term and long term goals and have a set amount of calories to aim for daily. Read here to find out more about the different apps I use for my weight loss journey!

Around the time I started tracking my food intake was when I started walking daily and adding in things like squats, planks, and light dumbbell training to lose weight. You can read more about that here. But basically I started walking daily! At minimum I was walking 2 miles a day and at most 6 miles a day. I was definitely losing faster walking 6, but honestly it’s hard to keep that up. Specially in these colder months! I don’t know about most people, but I shiver in the shadows when it’s 70° and sunny, so these freezing temps are making it even harder to get out and walk.

One of these days I will get a gym membership again….when it’s in my budget! Until then I’m at Mother Nature’s mercy.

All five of these habits have helped me lose 30lbs. But I listed tracking food and exercising daily first because I feel like these two habits helped me the most when losing weight. But prepping things like my clothes and breakfast/snacks/lunch for the next day is what kept me going on my weight loss journey!

Being able to wake up and just getting dressed from the clothes I set out on my vanity chair the night before cut out at least 10 minutes in my morning trying to decide what to wear! And when it’s time to leave I go downstairs, open the fridge, and grab my pre-packed lunch bag and out the door I go!

Makes for a much less stressful morning!

This is kinda self explanatory. If I get up earlier in the mornings I have time to relax, work on my blog, get ready for my day, and maybe even leave early to walk or workout if it’s not too cold.

Taking weekends off from tracking my food and exercise definitely takes some of the stress off of my weight loss. I don’t go crazy on the food intake, but the weekends are when I take the opportunity to have a cheat meal or two and maybe a dessert treat. Either way I don’t track my weekends at all. Even if I go walking with my boyfriend I don’t track those because it’s just use relaxing. It’s not necessary to take off weekends to lose weight. In fact most people would benefit from not taking the weekends off because it’s harder for them to get back into it on Mondays. But for me it works out perfectly and Monday’s it’s right back to tracking and walks.

There are many great habits to start that can help in your everyday life! And I know everyone has bad habits they can learn to drop completely!

Have any habits that help you on your journey? Comment and tell me about it!