With spring heading towards its conclusion and summer nearly upon us, your attention is probably turning to how to get the most enjoyment out of the warm weather, the longer days and the general uplift in mood that everyone experiences once the holiday season rolls around.
Whether it be taking advantage of all the great food and vegetables available to improve your diet, using the motivation of a beach holiday to hit the gym or simply getting out in the great outdoors for some much-needed fresh air, the summer offers us plenty of ways to both look and feel great.
Here are four for starters.
1. Eat Well
While the heat of the summer may tempt us into eating more ice cream and trips to amusement parks or the fun of the fair will naturally mean cotton candy, summer can actually be the time of year when we are at our healthiest. When it is cold out, we often desire hot food with high calorie counts; in summer, our bodies crave raw or lightly cooked food. A cool salad or a refreshing piece of fruit tastes much better after a day spent under the hot sun and the abundance of fresh fruit and vegetables available during the summer months makes it far easier to eat healthily as well.
2. Get Exercising
Exercise in the summer can take on many forms. There’s the casual exercise you and your family can take part in by dusting those bicycles down and going on a bike ride or spending the afternoon in a park tossing a football or kicking a soccer ball around. If you’re jetting away for a couple of weeks on the beach, you might want to get your beach body in shape and that can provide encouragement to hit the gym in an attempt to lose weight through running on the treadmill or getting toned with a routine like the work out box chest and bicep workout.
3. Enjoy The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors is full of sunshine and fresh air and is the best place to enjoy your summer. There are 59 sites in the United States that have “National Park” within their proper name such as Yellowstone, Grand Canyon and Everglades, but there are actually 417 national park sites across America covering over 84 million acres across each state and several overseas territories. Exploring the ones local to you is a sure-fire way to feel great this summer.
4. Soak Up Some Sun
For years, we’ve been told that being out in the sun is terrible for us. The sun has been demonized as being responsible for skin cancer and that anytime spent in it will shorten our life span. The truth is we need the sun – it’s the only reliable way outside of taking supplements that our body can get its required level of vitamin D. Of course, you need to be taking precautions to protect yourself like wearing sunscreen but the sun has an important role to play in keeping us healthy. Get out there and soak it up.
