How To Live A Healthy Lifestyle Working From Home

Finding ways to live a healthy lifestyle is an important part of the work at home lifestyle. It’s easy to fall into bad habits that compromise your health.

Instead of living and feeling awesome, you’re tired, stressed, and out of shape. Now, I’m not a nutrition or fitness expert. I’m just a mom who has spent her last 24 years working from home.

And, I completely understand the struggles of making good lifestyle choices.

How To Live A Healthy Lifestyle Working From Home

The challenge of those choices is real for me. For many years I struggled with bad eating habits, overworking, and too much stress.

A few things made me realize I needed some changes to improve my health and my life more. A habit of just eating whatever I wanted took its toll and I hit a weight I never thought I’d reach. I was devastated at the number on the scale.

That added weight brought with it other problems: fatigue, lack of mobility, and low self-esteem.  I knew not taking care of myself, being too busy, and high stress would make more health problems show up if I didn’t act soon.

Not just my health suffered, I realized that my business goals were suffering. Busy work and stress doesn’t help me be productive. It did the opposite!

Therefore, I came up with some easy steps any can take to change how they live and work from home.

5 Tips to Live a Healthy Lifestyle Working From Home

Before you start with these tips, decide which ones are your biggest struggles. Pick one and work on it. After a month or two, it will be a new habit.

And then, start another new one. Don’t overdo too many changes at once. It may overwhelm you and cause you to give up quickly.

Change What You Eat

This is a big one! Do you eat a lot of convenient foods for meals?

Do your snacks usually come with a lot of empty calories? These usually include an excess of: sugar, processed carbs, unhealthy fats, high sodium, and preservatives.

Begin to make small changes in what you eat. Look for easy meals with the main ingredients being a protein, vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and healthy fat. Switch out the cookies, chips, and snack cakes for fresh fruit, nuts, and other healthier snack choices.

Watch portions. It’s easy to eat that whole bag of chips when it’s right there within reach on your desk. Leave some room for your sweet tooth.

Adopt the 80/20 rule of 80% of your food being healthy and 20% whatever you want.  If you need ideas on getting started there are tons of healthy recipes on Pinterest, there’s plenty to chose from there!

Stay Hydrated

Soda, pop, cola…whatever you call it, can become addictive. I know because I’m one of those people that struggle with it. If it’s sugary drinks you’re taking in empty calories without hydrating your body.

And, for those like me, if you drink diet drinks, you are still drinking something that offers no benefits to your body. Some studies have shown diet drinks actually slow down your ability to lose or maintain weight.

Time published an opening article about the effects of these beverages: Diet Soda and Weight Gain: It’s Not Your Imagination.

Giving up sodas can be really hard to do. If that’s the case for you, slowly reduce the amount you drink each day, replacing them with water. Water hydrates the body better than any anything.  If you don’t like plain water, try water infused with fruit or sparkling water.

I’m trying these steps myself. Although I miss the taste of cola drinks, I’m slowly getting used to drinking sparkling waters and purified water. I hope to get to the point where I don’t miss these kinds of drinks at all and just have one on occasion.

Take Breaks and Move Around

For every 50 minutes of work, get up and move around 5-10 minutes. These little breaks help you eyes from being fatigued, refreshes your mind, and lets your body get some exercise.

This is great news because it gives you a chance to load the laundry in the washer, make beds, or check on dinner. Use your mini-breaks to play with your kiddos, take a quick walk outside for fresh air, or do some yoga.

Mayo Clinic quoted the Department of Health and Human services that an adult “get at least 150 minutes of moderate aerobic activity or 75 minutes of vigorous aerobic activity a week.”

Working in time to exercise is hard when you are already juggling parenthood, work, and housework. But if you divided it up into 2 – 15-minute sessions or 3 – 10 minutes sessions daily, it’s easier to fit into your breaks.

Make Time to Relax

Relax and recharge your energy. Otherwise, you run down and can’t work.

Take time in your day to relax. Spend time doing something you enjoy: reading, working on a craft project, watching a favorite show.

There’s nothing wrong with needing some quiet time for self-care, to recharge your energy. Don’t feel guilty about not working every free minute. That is just a setup for disaster.

Moms need breaks, too! Get a babysitter to go out on a date with your husband or trade-off with friends to let you have a day off occasionally to relax and do something fun.

Give yourself chances to unwind and enjoy some free time. It makes you better at what you do professionally and as a wife/mom.

Get Focused and Productive

This last tip is about how you use your time. Do you ever feel you’re all over the place? Do you chase after every idea but never get anywhere?

Does time in the day seem to disappear when you log in to your computer? You are not alone. There is a lot of “busyness” in working from home.

The number of ways you can earn money at home is too numerous to count. And working at home and online is filled with time wasters and distractions that suck away the precious minutes in the day.

The best things you can do for yourself is to practice being focused. Evaluate what are the important tasks. Focus on those. If you have multiple ideas swimming in your mind and making you bounce from idea to idea of making money, make a plan to figure which will be most likely to fulfil your financial goals.

What best fits your situation, too. Don’t chase every shiny opportunity you see. If something appears to be better than you’re doing now, logically think it over before jumping in.

Remove distractions that cause your productivity to be hindered. Use voicemail to answer your phone. Avoid social media and emails you work. Keep your office space organized.

Here are some more ideas that will help: 12 Tips to Be More Productive Working from Home & Destress by Decluttering Your Home Office.

To sum it up, the way to live healthy working from home is done by taking care of you first and using your time better. When you put your health and wellbeing before chasing after money, you actually improve your earning potential!