What is the best way to stay fit and healthy?

NOTE: This was originally written as a college essay. It is not intended to be used a source, stated facts might not be real or relevant anymore.

For most people, having a healthy lifestyle seems like something that is hard to accomplish, and some people had given up all their hopes of achieving it in some cases. However, developing a healthy lifestyle it is not necessarily that hard. It requires a lot of work, discipline and yes, also some pain. Nevertheless, the benefits of the whole are larger than the offsets of it: Having a healthy lifestyle can directly affect the number of years you will live and the quality of your health during those years.

The most crucial aspect for a balanced lifestyle is your diet: Not too much of this, not too much of that, and definitely, not too much of sugar and carbs! A diet does not mean that you have to starve yourself or just eat fruits and vegetables: balance is the key here. It is good to eat carbs sometimes, we need them anyways, but you have to be conscious on your choices and if you had pasta for lunch, perhaps for dinner you could eat a salad, or some rice. It is also important that you do not feel hungry all the time, because if you are, you are probably going to end eating things you should avoid. Fruits can be tasty snacks and they will make the hunger go away.

Another important aspect is exercise: You can restrict what you eat, but if you do not burn some calories every day, all that trouble would go into waste. Most people think exercise as something boring and hard to do, but you can give it a personal twist and make the most of it. It is important that you find what works best for you: for example, I like to dance quite a lot, and I discovered that if done regularly along other types of exercise, can be a great solution. Nevertheless, some people do not like dancing, and prefer running, or just even walking.

Once you start your diet and start exercising, perhaps you would like to get more insights on yourself. That is when we can talk about fitness trackers. What is a fitness tracker, anyways? It is a little device that you can wear on your wrist or clip it to your clothes that counts your steps and overall activity to get a more in-depth picture of your lifestyle, some of them can even analyze your sleep patterns and your water intake. Overall, these devices are not that exact, but they are very helpful to use because they give you insights on how well, or bad, are you doing.

A healthy lifestyle is not just what you eat and the exercise though; it is also how you behave in your day-to-day life. Taking the time to relax and do things that you enjoy is necessary here. People cannot survive if the only thing to do is work and be worried. At any given point, that will take a toll on the quality of your life, so always make sure to have some time for yourself to wind down and relax. Research has shown that people who worry less tend to have longer, healthier lives.

However, at the end, every person is a completely different world on their own, so you should look out what works best for you. There is no single diet, path or road to take here. You can try anything and everything. That is the only way you will be able to find what works for you. That is the key to a healthy lifestyle: Discovering and understanding how one works, and what is the most beneficial to us.