Keeping the whole family healthy can be tough. Inevitably someone will come home with a sniffly nose and promptly ensure that everyone else gets one too. Thankfully, there are many things you can do to improve your family’s health for the coming season and beyond.
Improve Your Diet
It’s very easy to fall into the trap of convenience when it comes to cooking. Knowing which meals your family likes and feeling confident with recipes are two of the biggest factors behind making the same meals on repeat. A small tweak that can make a big difference is adding some extra vegetables to your favourite dishes. A warming chilli is perfect for sneaking in vegetables, bell peppers and courgette work extremely well, enhancing flavour and helping to keep you full for longer. Similarly, a standard tomato pasta sauce can be paired with mushrooms or aubergines for a luxurious take on the everyday staple.
If you haven’t yet tried roasting vegetables, then you need to give it a go. It’s one of the simplest methods of bringing out the flavour of different vegetables, with minimum effort from you. Most vegetables undergo a beautiful transformation in the oven: cauliflower, broccoli, brussels sprouts, peppers – just about anything you can think of can be roasted and it’ll be delicious too!
Experiment with different flavour combinations by exploring herbs and spices from around the world, though if you’re not quite ready for that yet, garlic and olive oil will always work to please everybody.
Keep Fit
With the days getting shorter and darker, keeping fit will become more of a challenge for many. The task isn’t impossible especially if you make it part of your daily or weekly routine. It can seem intimidating to try and hit the recommended target of 150 minutes exercise per week but breaking it up into small daily bits is very manageable. You’ve heard this advice before – walk up the stairs, don’t take a lift and try and get in as many steps as you can each day.
Try making these small changes for a month (you can start off doing this just in the morning when you have more energy) and see the difference they’ll make to your overall fitness.
Exercise doesn’t have to be some herculean task that must take place at the gym for an hour each time. Building up your fitness at a slow and steady pace will help to create long term habits; try doing just ten minutes a day a few times week, establishing consistency. Whilst you follow an exercise video you can try and persuade more family members to join in, making the time fly by without you even noticing.
Quit Smoking…or just never start!
By now, most smokers will know that smoking is an extremely unhealthy habit. Smoking seriously harms your health and dramatically shortens your lifespan, it also has an effect on those around you through second-hand smoke. No matter how careful you are, you’ve probably smoked in the vicinity of your loved ones a few times, exposing them to harmful chemicals. It’s never too late to quit smoking and if you need a little help to make the process easier then look into vaping devices from JUUL Labs. Vaping can apparently help to ease the transition to not smoking whilst lessening cravings for cigarettes over time. There are endless benefits to be gained by quitting and it will improve your and your family’s short and long-term health.