Pro Tips for Healthy Living: The Best-Kept Secrets to a Consistent Lifestyle

Living a healthy life isn’t about perfection, it’s about progress. For many, the journey to wellness can feel overwhelming, especially when it comes to maintaining a healthy weight. But what if the key to success isn’t a secret diet or a magic workout plan, but rather a set of simple, consistent habits?

Living a healthy life isn’t about perfection, it’s about progress. For many, the journey to wellness can feel overwhelming, especially when it comes to maintaining a healthy weight. But what if the key to success isn’t a secret diet or a magic workout plan, but rather a set of simple, consistent habits?

That’s exactly what we discovered when we asked individuals who have successfully maintained their weight, our “pros”,  to share the foundational habits that keep them on track. These “Pro Tips” are the real-life strategies that support a sustainable, healthy lifestyle. And the best part? Research backs them up.

What Research Says

A Stanford Medicine study confirms what our pros already know: tracking works. The study found, “the closer people track their weight-loss efforts with things like smart watches, digital scales and diet-monitoring websites, the more weight they tend to lose.” In fact, those who tracked their behaviors more frequently lost more weight.

The key? Consistency and engagement. Digital tools help users stay accountable, set goals, and make real-time adjustments to their habits, leading to better outcomes over time.

As a part of Medi-Share's Biblical Wellness Program, members have access to a unique health portal that offers a health content library, courses, and trackers, just to name a few. Trackers help to monitor your progress on key lifestyle goals like vegetable intake, physical activity, daily steps, hydration and much more, like:

• Tracking your food provides all the insights you need around meal choices and how it all stacks up toward your daily intake and caloric consumption.

• Fitness Watches, like Fitbit or Garmin, come in many shapes and sizes. They offer features like reminders and accountability to get moving, do planned workouts and to stand throughout the day, in a sitting world.

• Sleep rings track how much sleep you are getting, different sleep cycles, how long you stay asleep, and offer insights into patterns that will help get you the rest you need.

Whatever you choose by way of trackers and apps, they can bridge the gap by offering visual cues to see how close you can get to the goal, competitive features and real time feedback loops. Staying engaged longer and becoming more aware makes these great tools to get results. In the health portal you can also monitor progress by using trackers for key outcome goals like weight, blood pressure, sugar levels, or cholesterol. The key to success is tracking and consistency, you can do both by logging into the portal and beginning your health journey.

Tips from the Weight Loss Pros

• Pray about this: “Putting God in the middle of your health goals changes things. Ask for wisdom and strength for the journey. Allow yourself to live in God’s grace in this area of your life and watch how he moves.”
• Mindset: “See yourself as a healthy person. Striving for consistency is a way of life, not a diet that you go on and off. A certain weight isn’t even the end goal-the end goal is a healthy lifestyle. Most people who are at a healthy weighted have as many, if not more, goals than those only trying to lose weight through a restrictive diet approach.”
• Consistency: “Starting and stopping is not a lifestyle. If you don’t do it one day, do it the next day. Stop telling yourself you’ll start again when things calm down. Busy doesn’t go away, it just shifts from one area of life to another…this is life. Figure out how to be consistent in both the busy and best seasons of your life soon you’ll realize that you created a consistent and growing healthy lifestyle.”
• Track your weight: “It’s important to know where you are. Age, stress, schedules, and even sleep can impact weight. You can only adjust your daily choices if you know where your weight is currently. Don’t ignore it. It’s not going away”
• Eat for performance: “Food provides the fuel your body and brain need to function, perform and meet the demands of life. Choose food with this in mind, so that you can not only just perform the functions you need, but also do them well.”
• Keep treats in their place: “Sweet treats, special drinks, and sugary coffee should not be a daily occurrence. Choose when and how often you have these types of items and keep them out of the day-to-day. If you have it every day, it’s not a treat."
• Food Mindset: “Food should not be a feel-good item; it does not fulfill or satisfy you. It does not change or fix emotions; that’s a power only God can provide.”
• Natural Activity: “Our bodies were created to move. Get moving, Period.”
• Cardiovascular Activity: “Planned activity is a key component to energy, endurance and strength. It does require consistency, and it requires you to progress – you can’t get better if you only ever walk at a slow pace. Most are performing below their potential. Explore the feeling you get after holding nothing back from a workout and I guarantee you will want to come back for more!”
• Strength Training: “Strength training is not just for weightlifters. Everyone needs strong muscles and bones to meet the daily demands we place on our bodies. Movements like lifting groceries out of your trunk, bending, reaching, or sitting shouldn't pose a risk of injury. Strong muscles are about functioning at the capacity at which you were designed to perform.”
• The One Thing: “It all comes back to goal setting and consistency. Know where you are, where you are going and track it.”
  
  

Want to learn more about how to keep a consistent healthy lifestyle? Login to your member center and visit the Health & Wellness Portal.