Healthy Lifestyle Essay Sample

Managing all the new responsibilities life has for you after college can be challenging, and quite often smaller aspects of life such as nutrition and health get thrown by the wayside. This doesn’t have to be the case and honestly shouldn’t as improper health practices can have side effects that really impair your life. While keeping a healthy diet and workout schedule may seem daunting, it’s a lot simpler than lead-on-to-be. The first thing to consider when speaking on nutrition is caloric intake. The body has a natural maintenance cost called BMR or basal metabolic rate, this is how many calories your body needs to consume a day to maintain itself and your weight. If you exceed this number you will gain weight, if you recede that number you lose weight. Everyone’s BMR is different and thus differs from individual to individual, with a good way to check your personal needs is through a calorie calculator online. Once you know your maintenance calories, you know how to maintain your weight. Technically speaking you could throw out any workouts and eat whatever you want as long as you don't go beyond the maintenance levels you would remain relatively healthy, but this isn't a guide to just let you scrape by. To be consistently healthy a person should make sure they are consuming the proper macronutrients, having a good mix of aerobic and anaerobic activities, and staying within the confines of the maintenance calories.

First on the list for healthy living is macronutrients and for good reason. Macronutrients also known as macros have specific roles when tied to your body's function. Such as protein which repairs and builds muscles and carbs which are converted to glucose which ultimately gives you energy. The need for each macro is broken down in your diet by percentages, with the majority of your diet being made up of carbohydrates. Avita Health suggests that carbohydrates should make up 45-65% of your diet. This makes sense as carbohydrates are broken down into glucose which is the primary energy source of your body. Simple Carbohydrates and Complex Carbohydrates are the two different genres of carbs that can be digested with simple carbs typically being made up of fast-digesting sugars, which are typically unhealthier. While complex carbs take more time to digest and are made up of grains, rice, and scratches which are heavier in fiber and seen as healthier. The next macro is protein with the target ranging between 10-35% of your diet. Protein is rather simple it helps your body grow, build, and repair tissue and is crucial for muscle maintenance. Finally, you have fats, which are separated into two groups, saturated and unsaturated. Saturated fats are commonly found in fattier cuts of meat, and dairies such as butter and cheese. Saturated Fats are known to cause an increase in cholesterol levels and risk of heart disease. Unsaturated Fats are considerably healthier even lowering your risk for heart disease and are found in nuts, seeds, and things like avocados. These core elements make up health from a nutritional standpoint, however, there is another aspect in physical activity.

Physical fitness is often the biggest challenge when taking a healthy lifestyle into consideration. Having to work, pay bills, and manage a social life leaves little time for an hour or two to hit the gym. It’s because of this time constraint that HIIT is a great option when looking for a solid workout style that doesn't take up much time. HIIT or High-Intensity Interval Training is a cardio-based workout style that prioritizes the effectiveness of your training. When hearing the word cardio a lot of people jump to a lot of running, but HIIT isn’t necessarily direct cardio. It combines resistance training such as air squats, pushups, and planking with some cardio techniques like high knees or jump roping to build muscle and get your heart rate up. The catch being all these exercises are to be performed in rapid succession with little to no break between. This leads to most HIIT workouts only taking 15 to 20 minutes but have the effectiveness of a full 2-hour session at the gym. This along with the ability to perform HIIT not being constrained by equipment means it’s the perfect workout type for an average recently graduated 20 year old.

Overall there are three keys to a healthy lifestyle, staying neutral for your caloric intake, working out with cardio and resistance training, and having a balanced diet. To manage all of the above within the limits of a recent graduate an optimal lifestyle would mix affordability with practicality. For meals, great breakfast options would include protein cereals, eggs, protein pancakes, and instant oatmeals. Lunch options could be meal prepped on free days, with items like seared chicken breast, peas, rice, tuna, noodles, and string beans all being great options. Dinners could be ordered in, but a good at-home option would be a seared salmon over a bed of rice with broccoli on the side. As long as your meals follow the guideline of 60% carbs, 30% protein, and 10% fats while prioritizing complex carbs and unsaturated fats the specifics can be interchanged. For physical fitness, doing HIIT 4 to 5 times a week for 20 minutes each session should be plenty to keep up your physical health. A good workout plan would consist of drop lunges, burpee crunch, plank jack hops, step to jump squat, pop jacks, and tricep press backs, for 4 sets doing each exercise for 30 seconds with a 12-second interval between each exercise and then a 1-minute rest between each set. If all these principles are followed any individual 20 or older will maintain a high level of physical fitness and be a lot healthier than a majority of people out there.