7 Ways to Have a Healthy Year

1. Analyze Your Physical Health

To analyze your health, analyze your diet. Take a blank journal and write down everything you eat for the next two weeks. Count carbs and calories. Assess sodium, saturated fats, and other potentially hazardous ingredients in our food that may harm our health. At the end of two weeks, go back and read what you ate. You may be shocked to learn you're taking in way more calories and carbs than you need. Analyze your sleep and stress.

Poor sleep due to excess cortisol in the body can cause us to store extra fat. Poor sleep may not allow us to restore our bodies for the following day. Set goals based on what you discover. Do an elimination diet and eliminate soy, gluten, and other potential foods that may cause you allergic reactions. Even if you don't see victories on the scale, you may see it by measuring your waistline. Celebrate the wins when you receive them.

2. Analyze Your Emotional Health

Some of our stress comes from a lack of forgiveness and bitterness affecting how we view the world. Additionally, lack of forgiveness and bitterness can also affect our ability to have healthy relationships. Just as the Lord keeps us physically healthy, we can also ask him for emotional health. Ask him to reveal people whom we need to forgive. If you're struggling with this, ask the Spirit to help you lift the weight of anger and other negative emotions from your life. These negative emotions not only keep you unhealthy but may cause you to eat your emotions, causing you to put on excess weight.

3. Analyze Your Mental Health

Do you tend to overthink things or obsess about what other people think of you? Your thoughts fuel your actions. If your thoughts are negative and not in line with Scripture, your actions will likely follow. Replace negative thoughts with the truth of God's Word. A great resolution is to memorize Scripture. Seek to memorize a specific number of verses for the year. Seeing your growth from one year to the next will be amazing.

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4. Analyze Your Spiritual Health

Your spiritual life is just as important as any other area of your life. Sometimes, the issues in our spiritual life have to do with our feelings towards God. Are you mad at God for something? Forgiveness issues with God? Holding on to resentment with God will allow you to start questioning the Word of God. Questioning the Word of God will allow your life to become out of alignment. We then start making choices based on selfishness rather than on godliness. When was the last time you read the Word of God? Is your life anchored on hearing from God or hearing from others? Do you pray regularly? Do you hear and discern the voice of God? All these practices are imperative when it comes to a healthy spiritual life.

5. Set Realistic Goals

Now that you've analyzed every area of your health, it's time to set some realistic goals. Often, people set generic, unattainable goals and get upset when they don't reach them. For example, you may want to lose weight. But the goal is not to lose weight by April but rather to target a specific, attainable goal. Since weight loss occurs between 1 and 2 pounds a week, it is realistic to set a goal of losing 20 pounds by May. If your hard work is paying off and you're losing more weight, it's an extra win. Whatever you choose to do, set attainable goals. Re-evaluate them if you find you're not meeting them. Do what you can to meet them, but also realize that it's up to God whether you achieve your goals or not.

6. Take Baby Steps

Sometimes, health-related goals are due to re-wiring our brains based on what we learned as children. Our habits in terms of sleep patterns, diet, exercise, etc. may stem from how we treated our bodies as children. For example, if we didn't have parents who exercised regularly or ate right, it is easy for us to fall into unhealthy patterns, buying junk food and eating sugar-laden, high-fat foods. Exercise is good for keeping us healthy all the days of our lives.

The same is true with eating healthy. 1 Corinthians 6:19 says, "Your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit." Treat it that way by eating right, exercising, sleeping regularly, and keeping your stress levels down. Even when life can feel out of control, we can cling to a God who is never out of control.

Even when your goals are difficult, take one step toward health. Change your lunch choice. Eat at regular intervals and make sure your body is constantly at a stable glucose level. Eat only foods that have a low glycemic index. Changing only one thing instead of several may feel less overwhelming, and it is easier to retrain your brain.

Your brain releases chemicals that signal cravings whenever you see the food you have eaten before. When we have a pleasurable feeling from food, a shot of dopamine is released in the brain. Your brain remembers this and tells you to keep on doing it. Getting that good feeling may result in excess weight and stress levels that can be detrimental to our health. Make a habit of eating healthy foods for the next twenty-one days. At the end of the month, analyze how you've changed. Do you find you still crave those foods, or are you interested in different foods because of the changes you've made? Celebrate the win and take another baby step when ready.

7. Reduce Stress

One of the worst ways we damage our bodies is with a stressful lifestyle. Some stress is impossible to avoid. Job loss, financial difficulties, and health crises are all things that happen to us. However, we can either blame God and continue unhealthy patterns of behavior, or we can choose right patterns of behavior. Take steps to reduce your stress by praying and meditating on the Word, exercising regularly, sitting in silence, listening to calming music, and cutting off toxic relationships. Taking at least a few of these steps will help maintain a healthy body and mind.

Even if your health seems beyond repair, we can always take steps to better ourselves. God wants us to live in health and freedom, not bondage and stress. Take the suggestions above or create some of your own to make this the healthiest year ever.