While moving out of home and starting work full time is great for becoming independent and autonomous, it sure adds to the everyday stress we experience. Why did no one warn us of the difficulty of living a healthy life during all those years of school?
That’s why we are here today, hoping to support you by offering the best tips we can. We all went through this period where we faced many new challenges at once like starting at Uni, starting a new job, moving out, or all three at once. Life gets very busy and it happens to the best of us to stop taking “me” time in favour of being busy. Unfortunately, this cannot usually last, and that’s why the following tips are so useful.
Food
Meal prepping (over the week-end, at night for the day after) is a practice that will immensely help your wallet and your schedule: making an extra portion or 2 when you cook won’t actually add to the time required to make your dinner, but it saves you expensive lunches when you’re out at work or at uni, and it also saves you from going, queuing and waiting for your lunch. This way you might have more time to be productive…. Or more time to enjoy on TikTok (Psst psst, check out our TikTok).
Another way of improving your diet is to look more closely at the snacks you have during the day. Snacking can help stabilise your metabolism and normalise your blood sugar, but eating too many of them in an unbalanced way will work against you. Instead, as a baby step start by taking with you healthy snacks which you will be able to have throughout the day. By taking this habit, you will start breaking down your previous bad habits and build better ones instead, effectively tackling the issue at its root.
For the good measure, I am adding this video showing the size comparison of equivalent amounts of calories between different foods:
Exercise
If your days are extremely busy and organised by the minute, reading our recommendation to exercise for your health is probably going to trigger in you the inherent urge to tell us off. While I understand and agree, I ask you to give us the benefit of the doubt and let us elaborate. A lot of our habits nowadays keep us busy but don’t contribute to much, not even genuine relaxation or happiness. I am looking at you, social media. I will assume you are the average person and spend the average time on social media (2 hours and 29 minutes per day). Now imagine out of these 2 and a half hours, if you took just 20 to 30 minutes crushing a brief HIIT workout, in the morning before leaving for your obligations or at night, once you’re done with everything and you are just waiting for your food to cook. Do this and you will see massive improvements in yourself
You time
Take the time in your schedule to lock-in some “you time”. This includes doing any hobby or any form of relaxation you enjoy doing most. While it may seem to some as wasted time, it helps keeping up your mental health and being super productive the rest of the time! You can also combine it to other activities: read a book on your way to work/Uni and you will feel invigorated.
Regardless of what your specific actions are, always try and prioritise yourself in those 3 aspects mentioned above. To help with that, it is also best to plan out your week ahead of time and you will be able to adjust finely your time between your obligations, yourself and your friends. Make sure to give us a heads up if you need any help with planning: we became pros at it.