Everyone knows that living a healthy lifestyle is important. Improves your physical health, as well as your mental health. How a healthy lifestyle looks is different for everybody. I’m going to share a little bit about what that means for me.

I’ve shared before that way way way back in the early days of Lauren, I was a dancer.

Dancing kept me really active all through high school. Everyday, I’d get done with school and head to my dance studio for at least a couple of hours every single night. Weekends, I was there even more time participating in their entertaining groups and youth ballet company. Needless to say, “working out” and being “healthy” were never difficult because I was so active with my dance classes.

Now enter college, and I didn’t have a regular routine or forced working out, and nobody was stopping me from eating an entire sleeve of Oreos for dinner. I lived my four years of undergrad, graduate school, and my first few years of working with no healthy routine. I’d go through phases of working out. Phases of eating healthy. I never felt great, but I also never found a routine and something I loved to do that worked for me.

After moving back to Kansas City, I came to the realization that I needed to find something I loved and could do consistently over a long period of time. Enter Bar Method. I had friends that I had danced with in high school that were now instructors at Bar, and I decided to give it a shot. It ticked off a lot of boxes for me: classes with friends motivated me to get there and stay engaged, and it built off of strengthening and lengthening muscles the same way that I was used to working out in dance in high school. It stuck, and I’ve been doing Bar for almost eight years now. 😲

The most important thing in sticking with it, is a commitment to myself to spend the morning before everyone wakes up doing something for me. Usually that means spending an hour to work out. It sets the tone for my day, and how I feel. My days just feel better if I’ve moved my body, stretched it, and spent that hour doing something active.

The other thing that makes a huge difference in how I feel physically is how much water I drink. I used to drink no water. Virtually none. Somewhere in my move back to KC, I committed to drinking the recommended eight glasses of water a day. It was hard at first, but I recognized over time that my body craved that water after I had been so consistent about drinking a lot of water for an extended period of time. Now, I worry less about how many cups of water I get in, and instead worry about how my body feels. That period fo time set me up that my body craves the water, and I love water now. It’s a bonus that when I get up early to work out, I can also drink about three glasses of water before the day even starts. And it makes me feel so much better throughout the day. Once the chaos starts in this house, it’s hard to remember to keep refilling that water!

Part of every healthy lifestyle certainly comes back to the foods you’re putting in your body. Generally speaking, I try to eat healthy, but I don’t get bogged down in the food. Some days I snack more than others. Some days I eat pizza for lunch and burgers for dinner, with a side of chips. But they are the exception. Overall, I wait to eat anything until about 9:30/10 in the morning, and then it is just a protein bar. I’ve heard that this is, unbeknownst to me, some type of intermittent fasting. But, truthfully, I don’t worry excessively about what I’m eating. We cook most of our meals at home, so they’re already naturally more healthy, and it’s easier to control portions at home, too. I do almost every day, though, treat myself to some type of dessert. Usually ice cream or a dark chocolate peanut butter cup. It’s my pat on the back for making it through the day.

It’s been a journey, and I try to give myself an ample amount of grace. There are more mornings that I opt for sleep versus a work out than I would like, but I also realize that this is just a really physically demanding time for me. With two little active boys, who also go to daycare, I’m physically drained by the end of the day, not to mention that we see our fair share of colds. It’s a hard and beautiful stage of life, and I’ve come to peace with what I’m able to do now for myself.