You can take a 20-minute walk (before breakfast if possible!), or stretch for 15 minutes, or do a solo workout in your bedroom for 10 minutes, or go up and down your condo stairs for 5 minutes. All those actions won’t take much time and will put you in the mindset of a healthy person. If not for the rest of the day, at least for the next hour or so, which will help you make more healthy decisions, one thing leading to another. Yes, there is a snowball effect to this!
If time is a real struggle for you, skip the extra physical activity, but make sure your breakfast is as healthy as can be. Not only will it give you energy for hours, but it will also remind you very early on that you ARE a healthy person, and can be the entire day.
Keep your morning routine simple
Your “healthy morning action” should be easy and enjoyable enough that you don’t dread it. You might not look forward to it (at least not at first!), but it should not require much willpower. Because you want to do this EVERY SINGLE DAY. So make it short, easy, and sustainable.
Yet, not too easy!
It should still be some kind of effort though! Not a tough battle like showing up at boot camp class or spending an hour cooking a 5-star vegan breakfast. But you want to make sure that the achievement feels just good enough that you don’t want to ruin it within the next hour. That’s the secret to success! If you have to push yourself a bit to do some yoga for 15 minutes, will you want to gobble up 4 waffles covered in syrup right after? Most likely not. Otherwise, you would have done yoga pretty much for nothing.
What’s your healthy morning plan?
You have to find the right activity and the right level of difficulty. Why not start today and experiment with different things? I suggest that you think about what you are going to do tomorrow morning! Write it down and start experimenting. Try it until the end of the week and see how it works. Check off on your calendar every day you successfully complete your activity. If you are not happy with an action or can’t do it every day, find something else. Keep experimenting until you find the short activity that will make you FEEL healthy.
This little tweak in your day will make a big difference in your holidays, and it won’t stop there, believe me!