How do you feel about your general health at the moment? Do you think you live a truly healthy lifestyle? You might be someone who thinks they’re quite healthy, but a closer analysis of your daily diet, work, and other activities might reveal a very different picture. The scary thing is that it’s quite possible to appear as a real picture of health, only to later suddenly discover that you are actually harbouring some quite serious problems in your body and mind.

If you want to try and turn things around for the better and live a healthier life, then here are some ways you might get started.

1. Consider Holistic and Preventative Healthcare Options

Holistic medicine is that which takes into account your lifestyle, diet, environment and other factors when considering how best to treat and support your health problems. Much of it is also focused on preventing disease rather than simply responding to symptoms as is common in much of Western medicine.

Have you ever, for example, tried professional osteopathic treatment in Melbourne? How about acupuncture in Sydney? Myotherapy in Perth? These kinds of interesting and complementary practices are not miracle cures, but can become an integral part of a healthier approach to living.

2. Improve Your Diet and Nutrition

So often, the source of much of our overall malaise in life can be traced back to our increasingly poor relationship with food and drink. In particular, our sugar intake has dramatically increased over the years, leading to increasing obesity, as well as problems such as diabetes.

It’s mostly our worship of convenience and speed that has caused this, but we can retake the culinary high ground if we make the effort to cook for ourselves again. By controlling the ingredients first-hand, we can be in better control of what goes into our bodies.

3. Become More Physically Active

Another common modern disease of the 21st century is that of the sedentary lifestyle. More and more of us now spend the entire day sitting down, and it might just be killing us slowly. Where in times past physical activity on any day was a given, the modern world offers no such guarantees.

A typical white-collar worker might spend their morning commute seated on the bus or in their car, then seated in their office chair before sitting in a restaurant for lunch, then more office chair time, back in the car again, then right onto the sofa when they get home. That’s a lot of sitting!

4. Cut Back or Cut Out Vices

Smoking and drinking for some people are two of life’s little pleasures that are just too good to give up entirely. First, looking at smoking, it’s a really disgusting habit that has precisely zero real benefit to your life whatsoever. Besides the enjoyment, the rest is all downside. At least with some alcohol consumption, such as red wine, there are certain benefits in moderation like a boost in antioxidants.

Overall, if you want to be healthier, one needs to cut out certain vices from life, or at least drastically cut back on them. If you smoke 20 a day, start by trying to cut down to 10-15 and see how it goes. No one is forcing you to go cold turkey. Go slow, feel the benefit, and then keep working towards an ultimate goal of zero a day if you can.

5. Learn to Relax

Finally, for the sake of our lasting mental health, most of us in the world need to take a refresher course on how to relax. We are often utterly consumed by the stress of life, and it’s important that we can sometimes switch off, calm down, and find ways to relax and unwind. It’s only when we restore ourselves to that calm state that we can truly function properly anyway!