How Conscious Lifestyle Choices Unlock Peak Performance

Are your daily habits and lifestyle choices helping you thrive, or quietly holding you back from peak performance? Making conscious choices—about food, self-care, and mindset—can transform your energy, focus, and overall well-being.

Joy is a doctor and owner of a private medical practice. She’s also a widow who doesn’t have children. She often feels drained by mid afternoon, and, on her way home from work, she stops by a fast-food restaurant and picks up a burger and fries for dinner. She eats in the car in the parking lot.

When Joy called me, I did an assessment and noticed ways she could make healthier food choices. I also saw that Joy had few pleasures in life. We created a plan. She acted on this plan and began to prep meals on the weekend so she could cook dinner for herself and make healthier food choices.  She began to take pleasure in eating dinner again. She smiled as she bought flowers for herself for the first time in a long time. She sat down, relaxed, and ate dinner slowly, taking in the aromas, textures, and flavors as she savored her food. This was how Joy chose to make more conscious and enjoyable lifestyle choices at dinner. Her diabetes numbers improved and she had the vitality to work at peak performance again.

What’s the secret to making more intentional lifestyle choices? As part of my own weight loss journey, I discovered meditation as a way to create more equanimity in my life.  Being at peace with myself allowed me to discover how to live in my sweet spot: healthier in mind, my body at the weight I wanted to be, and look in the mirror and love who I see. Like most of my clients, one of the biggest problems I faced was making unconscious choices.

Is Unconscious Living Draining Your Performance?

Are you so busy with life that you make unconscious lifestyle choices that are affecting your health? If so, it may be time to notice hidden symptoms of making unconscious choices that can sap your energy and can lead to burnout. Do you notice that you tend to:

• Avoid doing what you know you want and need to do,
• Worry about what other people think,
• Ignore your body’s needs in the flurry of a fast-paced life?

There is an alternative. Making conscious choices can help you focus on self-care and stop making mindless lifestyle choices that rob you of your health and vitality.

Five Steps for Making Conscious Lifestyle Choices

You’ll be more likely to make a conscious choice when you become aware of what you doing, feeling, and what you truly want. How can you make conscious lifestyle choices?  Here are 5 steps to help you create clarity and consider making a different choice that aligns with your values, yearnings, and chosen life direction.

1. Become aware of what is prompting you to make this choice.
2. Be willing to be okay with doing things differently and make your own rules instead of following someone else’s expectations, especially about body image.
3. Allow yourself to follow your own inner guidance. What do you feel? Allow yourself to accept your feelings. Discover what you truly want that may be different from what others want or expect.
4. Become aware of what you’re doing in the moment instead of being distracted by other activities.
5. Tap into your innate self-compassion by accepting that mistakes are what help us grow.

Choose one of these 5 steps that most applies to you and write it down.  Take 3-5 minutes to develop next steps that you’re willing to apply to begin to make a specific healthier lifestyle choice.

Click here for self-care strategies on how to stop running on empty and fuel your momentum with self-care strategies for peak performances.

What can you do now to remove roadblocks and thrive?

Take my interactive quiz and immediately receive ideas and strategies tailored to your challenges: Top Inner Roadblocks to Weight Loss success: https://www.sweetlifewellness.com/roadblock-quiz/

Source:

Happy Life at a Healthy Weight, Creating a Shame Free, Healthy Relationship with Food and Life. Kay Loughrey, RDN, MPH. Authentic Wellness Publishing Company, LLC, 2024. Available through Amazon in eBook and paperback formats and through other companies where books are sold.