Behavior that leaves you angry, worried, or stressed all of the time. Bad Habit: Snacking non-stop, even when not hungry. Spending too much time on the couch watching TV. Overspending your way into debt. Eating too much fast food.
1. Bad Habit: Snacking non-stop, even when not hungry.
Why It's Dangerous: Losing touch with your body's natural hunger and satisfaction signals can lead to chronic overeating and unhealthy extra pounds that can lead to diabetes, heart disease, and other serious conditions. If it's junk foods you snack on, you're also flooding your body with unhealthy ingredients.
Why You Should Stop: With determination, anyone can fix bad eating habits, and get to a healthier, more natural weight. By paying attention to your hunger signals and switching to healthy snacks, you can boost nutrition, control cravings, lose weight, and avoid energy slumps. Your weight will fall to a healthier level, and you'll replace unhealthy trans and saturated fat, sugar, refined carbohydrates, and extra sodium with more nutritious fare.
Reverse the Habit:
- Reacquaint yourself with hunger: Wait to eat until your body is physically craving food.
- Stop eating before you're stuffed: Finish when you feel just a little bit full, you'll eat less this way.
- Eat for the right reason: Because you're hungry—not because you're stressed, bored, angry, or sad.
- Stop mindless eating: If snacking is an old, bad habit, ban unhealthy food from your home.
- Replace junk food with real food: Once you've cleared your pantry, stock your kitchen with fruits, veggies, nuts, and low-fat, whole-grain products.
- Plan snacks like you do meals: Eat your healthy snack on a plate, with a glass of water, and sit down at the table to enjoy it.
Why You Should Stop: With determination, anyone can fix bad eating habits, and get to a healthier, more natural weight. By paying attention to your hunger signals and switching to healthy snacks, you can boost nutrition, control cravings, lose weight, and avoid energy slumps. Your weight will fall to a healthier level, and you'll replace unhealthy trans and saturated fat, sugar, refined carbohydrates, and extra sodium with more nutritious fare.
Reverse the Habit:
- Reacquaint yourself with hunger: Wait to eat until your body is physically craving food.
- Stop eating before you're stuffed: Finish when you feel just a little bit full, you'll eat less this way.
- Eat for the right reason: Because you're hungry—not because you're stressed, bored, angry, or sad.
- Stop mindless eating: If snacking is an old, bad habit, ban unhealthy food from your home.
- Replace junk food with real food: Once you've cleared your pantry, stock your kitchen with fruits, veggies, nuts, and low-fat, whole-grain products.
- Plan snacks like you do meals: Eat your healthy snack on a plate, with a glass of water, and sit down at the table to enjoy it.
2. Bad Habit: Spending too much time on the couch watching TV.
Why It's Dangerous: The more TV you watch, the less physical activity you're getting, increasing your odds of being overweight and developing type 2 diabetes. A large-scale study of over 9000 people found that those who watched more than two hours of TV a day ate more, while downing more sugary soft drinks and high-fat, high-calorie, processed snack foods than those who watched less. If television is replacing time you'd spend on an old hobby, visiting friends, or exercising your mind, it can also speed up memory loss.
Why You Should Stop: By turning TV time into active time and committing to a healthy TV/activity balance, you can burn more calories, become more fit, and reduce your odds for related health problems quickly. You'll have a fitter body and more time for sleep, plus more energy, a better mood, sharper mind, and more social connections, which can even help you increase your self-confidence.
Reverse the Habit:
- Follow the 2/30 rule: That means no more than 2 hours of TV a day—and at least 30 minutes of exercise.
- Don't channel surf: Only turn the TV on when you have something specific to watch. Get out instead of searching mindlessly.
- Don't snack in front of the TV: It's far too easy to eat hundreds of calories' worth of chips and barely realize it.
- Exercise while you watch: Walk in place, do sit-ups, pushups, or drag your treadmill into the TV room.
- Clean during commercials: Avoid food commercials by emptying wastebaskets, vacuuming a room, or doing a load of laundry. It can add up to 20 minutes' worth of calorie-burning chore time everyday.
- Resolve to leave home more often: See more friends, do more interesting things, and stimulate your mind every day.
- Follow the 2/30 rule: That means no more than 2 hours of TV a day—and at least 30 minutes of exercise.
- Don't channel surf: Only turn the TV on when you have something specific to watch. Get out instead of searching mindlessly.
- Don't snack in front of the TV: It's far too easy to eat hundreds of calories' worth of chips and barely realize it.
- Exercise while you watch: Walk in place, do sit-ups, pushups, or drag your treadmill into the TV room.
- Clean during commercials: Avoid food commercials by emptying wastebaskets, vacuuming a room, or doing a load of laundry. It can add up to 20 minutes' worth of calorie-burning chore time everyday.
- Resolve to leave home more often: See more friends, do more interesting things, and stimulate your mind every day.
3. Bad Habit: Overspending your way into debt.
Why It's Dangerous: Money worries can have serious health consequences. In a Rutgers University telephone survey, responders said financial stress contributed to high blood pressure, depression, insomnia, headaches, digestion troubles, aches and pains, ulcers, excessive smoking and drinking, and gaining or losing weight.
Why You Should Stop: You'll regain a hold on your finances. It's tough, but getting yourself out of debt is a lot like losing weight. It takes time, can be hard on your ego and your lifestyle, you have to be constantly vigilant, and it's easy to revert back to old habits. But for those who succeed, and many people do, the results are stunning. You'll feel more in control of your life with less stress and fewer worries. You'll be able to sleep better, stop overeating, and have fewer headaches. Finding ways to curb your spending and focus on the simple joys in life will also help improve your relationships.
Reverse the Habit:
- Learn about money management: Educate yourself on the basic rules and methods of personal finance—for credit cards, mortgages, budgeting, and investing.
- Freeze your credit cards: Literally. Put them in a cup, add water, and relegate them to the back of your freezer so you'll stop using them.
- Create a budget: How much money is coming in each month? How much are you spending on essentials, and how much frivolously? Keep track, and discover what you need to cut back on.
- Pay at least the monthly minimum on your bills: Prioritize paying more on the highest-interest credit card. Once you've paid it off, move on to the next worst.
- Automate good monthly habits: Use online banking to transfer some of your paychecks into a savings account, and set your bills to be paid automatically.
- Change money priorities: Stop shopping as a form of entertainment or distraction. Identify important things you'll need in the future and start savings programs for each.
Reverse the Habit:
- Learn about money management: Educate yourself on the basic rules and methods of personal finance—for credit cards, mortgages, budgeting, and investing.
- Freeze your credit cards: Literally. Put them in a cup, add water, and relegate them to the back of your freezer so you'll stop using them.
- Create a budget: How much money is coming in each month? How much are you spending on essentials, and how much frivolously? Keep track, and discover what you need to cut back on.
- Pay at least the monthly minimum on your bills: Prioritize paying more on the highest-interest credit card. Once you've paid it off, move on to the next worst.
- Automate good monthly habits: Use online banking to transfer some of your paychecks into a savings account, and set your bills to be paid automatically.
- Change money priorities: Stop shopping as a form of entertainment or distraction. Identify important things you'll need in the future and start savings programs for each.
4. Bad Habit: Eating too much fast food.
Why It's Dangerous: A steady diet of double cheeseburgers and fries washed down with an oversize soda or milkshake often leads to a bigger waistline and other related health problems, like heart disease and diabetes. Trans fat, often found in fast food, raises 'bad' cholesterol and blood fats that contribute to hardening of the arteries, as well as firing up inflammation, which contributes to the build-up of fatty plaque in artery walls.
Why You Should Stop: The health benefits of making the switch to healthy food will be immediate and substantial. Making a permanent lifestyle change won't be easy at first. Fast food is super-convenient, surprisingly inexpensive, and thanks to all its fat, salt, and sugar, undeniably tasty. Healthy eating takes more time and thought, and in some cases, more money. It's worth it though. In addition to losing extra weight, slimming your waistline, and protecting yourself from heart disease and diabetes, you'll save money if you prepare your own meals instead of buying fast food.
Reverse the Habit:
Wean yourself off slowly: Cut back a little per week, and buy a little less each time you go.
-Switch to healthier menu options: Replace soda with coffee or water, burgers with grilled chicken, and fries with a salad.
- End impulse visits: Avoid popping into a fast food joint just because you walked or drove by one, especially if you aren't hungry or it isn't meal time.
- Switch to grocery stores: Hungry and need a fast meal? You can usually find healthier prepared meals at your local grocery store.
- Try a local sandwich shop: Walk into one and order a turkey on whole-wheat with a salad on the side.
- Make your own: Eat with confidence in your own kitchen, preparing yourself a healthy meal with last night's leftovers, adding a side of fruits and vegetables.
Why You Should Stop: The health benefits of making the switch to healthy food will be immediate and substantial. Making a permanent lifestyle change won't be easy at first. Fast food is super-convenient, surprisingly inexpensive, and thanks to all its fat, salt, and sugar, undeniably tasty. Healthy eating takes more time and thought, and in some cases, more money. It's worth it though. In addition to losing extra weight, slimming your waistline, and protecting yourself from heart disease and diabetes, you'll save money if you prepare your own meals instead of buying fast food.
Reverse the Habit:
Wean yourself off slowly: Cut back a little per week, and buy a little less each time you go.
-Switch to healthier menu options: Replace soda with coffee or water, burgers with grilled chicken, and fries with a salad.
- End impulse visits: Avoid popping into a fast food joint just because you walked or drove by one, especially if you aren't hungry or it isn't meal time.
- Switch to grocery stores: Hungry and need a fast meal? You can usually find healthier prepared meals at your local grocery store.
- Try a local sandwich shop: Walk into one and order a turkey on whole-wheat with a salad on the side.
- Make your own: Eat with confidence in your own kitchen, preparing yourself a healthy meal with last night's leftovers, adding a side of fruits and vegetables.
5. Bad Habit: Behavior that leaves you angry, worried, or stressed all of the time.
Why it's Dangerous: An unhappy lifestyle releases a cascade of stress hormones that increase your blood pressure and blood sugar, lower immunity, slow digestion, and make you feel downright mean. Nature intended stress to be a short-lived fight-or-flight response to a threat, but modern life can lead to chronic stress and to far-reaching impacts on your health, such as increased risk of being overweight and overeating high-fat, sugary foods. Both raise your odds for heart disease and diabetes.
Why You Should Stop: Stress-reduction techniques have been proven to lower blood sugar, improve immunity, reduce depression, ease chronic pain, lower blood sugar, and possibly protect your heart, too. A regained sense of joy and control is worth its weight in gold, and the physical health benefits will be substantial as well.
Why You Should Stop: Stress-reduction techniques have been proven to lower blood sugar, improve immunity, reduce depression, ease chronic pain, lower blood sugar, and possibly protect your heart, too. A regained sense of joy and control is worth its weight in gold, and the physical health benefits will be substantial as well.
Reverse the Habit:
- Learn to stop getting stressed so easily: How you react to triggers determines your stress level. Next time you feel a situation emerging, work hard at managing it and staying cool.
- Learn a formal stress-relief process: Among the most proven are yoga, meditation, and deep breathing.
- Rediscover optimism: Pessimism is a learned behavior. Regaining your sense of hope can go a long way toward stifling stress and regaining a sense of happiness.
- Eat healthy and exercise: A healthy lifestyle does wonders for your ability to manage stressful situations.
- Enjoy a relaxing hobby: Calm down by immersing yourself fully during your down time.
- Rediscover silliness: Remember than in every grown adult resides a young child. You're older, but you spirits doesn't have to be. Stop suppressing your sense of fun and silliness and remember to enjoy yourself.
- Learn to stop getting stressed so easily: How you react to triggers determines your stress level. Next time you feel a situation emerging, work hard at managing it and staying cool.
- Learn a formal stress-relief process: Among the most proven are yoga, meditation, and deep breathing.
- Rediscover optimism: Pessimism is a learned behavior. Regaining your sense of hope can go a long way toward stifling stress and regaining a sense of happiness.
- Eat healthy and exercise: A healthy lifestyle does wonders for your ability to manage stressful situations.
- Enjoy a relaxing hobby: Calm down by immersing yourself fully during your down time.
- Rediscover silliness: Remember than in every grown adult resides a young child. You're older, but you spirits doesn't have to be. Stop suppressing your sense of fun and silliness and remember to enjoy yourself.
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