What does it mean to live healthy? It is a question that can be answered in many different ways and is totally subjective. What it means to me is taking steps to keep your body healthy, not just with food, but with exercise. It’s about making choices to take the stairs, instead of the elevator; it’s about maintaining an exercise routine, it’s about exploration and pushing limits.

One of the most common things I hear about exercise is “I don’t have time for exercise, but I want to be healthier”. “I used to have a great exercise routine, but my job is a lot and I don’t have time anymore”. Here are three steps to jumpstart an exercise routine.

  1. Make exercise a priority. Everyone has important things in their life that take priority, whether it be people, events, or hobbies. Who says exercise can’t be one of them? By making exercise a priority, it can eventually become a habit, just like brushing your teeth. Prioritizing your health is a great way to care for yourself and give your body what it needs.
  2. Set goals for each week. Setting goals that are realistic are the best way to achieve them. These goals are agreements you have with yourself and knowing what is possible is a question only you can answer. For someone starting out, the goal could be walk two or three times a week for 30 minutes. For someone that has exercised in the past, it could be more rigorous. The importance of setting goals is to make them achievable. Once you reach them, you can create a new goals to reach and so on and so on.
  3. Put exercise on your calendar. With the world moving as fast as it does today, it is really important to put your exercise routine on a calendar as a scheduled event. We do this when we go to concerts, plays, trips, and other events and exercise should be no different. If you don’t currently have a calendar app, there are a lot to choose from that are free. I recommend shopping around for a calendar that is user friendly and good for you visually. We all look at things differently and the aesthetic of one calendar can be liked by some and not by others, so finding the one that appeals to you is best.