Considering your New Year’s resolutions? Let’s be honest: 95% of our resolutions involve kickstarting your health. We promise we’re going to go to the gym, eat healthily, cut down on our drinking, and go to bed early.
Despite our best intentions, old habits tend to creep back in, leaving our resolutions unfulfilled. Often, we overlook key factors that affect our wellbeing, such as managing allergies and intolerances—crucial steps for truly revitalising our health.
Join us as we explore how to kickstart your health journey effectively. We cover everything from health basics to food allergies and intolerances and provide expert advice on sticking to your New Year’s resolutions.
The Foundation of Excellent Health
When we think about improving our health, we often make it about grand gestures. Our New Year’s resolutions aren’t just to go to the gym once a week; we commit to going every single day. Yet, the best ways to enhance our health aren’t that complicated or difficult.
The foundation of health is threefold: diet, exercise, and sleep.
Diet
Changing your diet is mostly a matter of changing your habits. We’re often used to reaching for snack foods in the cupboard whenever we are hungry. Our tastebuds get accustomed to the salty, sweet, and hyper-flavoured processed foods. Everything else tastes bland by comparison.
Performing a detox diet is a sensible way to start. Remove all processed foods from your house, and focus on a whole-food diet. That includes plenty of fruits, vegetables, lean meats, and whole grains. If you’re not usually much of a cook, get some simple recipes to ease yourself in.
Try to make the food as tasty as possible – think curries, nutritious burritos, or a delicious stew. The more you enjoy it, the more likely you are to stick to it.
That being said, you shouldn’t eliminate treat foods entirely. Allocate a time when you’re going to eat them. Maybe you get a chocolate bar on Fridays after you’ve been good all week.
Exercise
Like your diet, exercise is about embedding new habits into your routine. Go too hard too fast, and you’re likely to give up. It’s best to improve from your baseline. Any form of exercise beyond what you normally do is a win.
For example, you could add a walk into your daily schedule. Maybe you could even walk to work if you usually drive or take the bus. Integrating exercise into your day is an excellent way to ensure you stick to your resolutions. Then, when that new habit is ingrained, you can try something else.
It’s also important to set goals. You could aim to run five miles by September. Every time you get a new mile under your belt, reward yourself. It will incentivise you to keep going.
Sleep
Sleep is the easiest of the three to master. Simply allocate at least an hour before bed to unwind. During this time, avoid looking at screens, keep the lights low, and engage in restful activities, e.g., yoga, meditation, reading, and showering. Set an alarm to let you know when the hour begins. Always keep your bedtime at the same time each day; it helps establish a circadian rhythm.
The worst thing you can do is eat too close to bedtime – especially fatty and sugary foods and don’t drink too much caffeine, as it will prevent you from falling asleep.
Understanding Allergies and Intolerances
Allergies and intolerances are the fourth pillar of health. Most people ignore these issues – however, they’re often the reason why you don’t feel any better despite doing the right thing. While allergies are usually easier to identify, intolerances can cause vague, systemic symptoms that plague people for years. For example, you might experience bloating, skin rashes, muscle aches, and general tiredness.
The only way to deal with these conditions is to eliminate the trigger from your diet. But you can only do that if you know what the trigger is. The Allergy & Intolerance Test Plus can help you identify these triggers by analysing a small blood sample for the presence of IgE and IgG4 antibodies. These are raised in allergies and intolerances, respectively. The test kit can identify 38 allergies and 79 tolerances.
Getting a test is the first step to understanding your allergies and intolerances. Armed with the right information, you ensure nothing is going wrong with your body that you’re unaware of.
Setting Realistic and Achievable Health Resolutions
If you’ve tried to set health resolutions before and failed, you’re not alone. Most people struggle to stick to their New Year’s resolutions. That’s usually because they fall into the same mistakes. Follow these tips to make sure 2025 is your year of success:
- Define Clear, Specific Goals: Instead of vague resolutions like “get healthy,” specify what you want to achieve, such as “exercise three times a week” or “eat five servings of vegetables daily.”
- Start Small: Break your main goal into smaller, manageable tasks. If your resolution is to run a 5K, start by walking regularly, then gradually introduce running intervals.
- Make It Measurable: Ensure that your goals are quantifiable. For example, instead of saying you’ll drink more water, set a goal to drink eight glasses of water daily.
- Be Realistic: Set goals that fit into your current lifestyle and limitations. Overly ambitious goals can be discouraging if they’re too hard to meet.
- Create a Timeline: Assign deadlines to your mini-goals to keep yourself on track. A timeline helps maintain your momentum and makes the process less overwhelming.
- Track Your Progress: Keep a journal, use an app, or maintain a log to monitor your progress. Seeing improvements, no matter how small, can boost your motivation.
- Focus on the Journey, Not Just the Outcome: Appreciate the changes you’re making in your lifestyle, and recognise that every healthy choice contributes to your overall wellbeing.
