Start Small: How to turn fitness resolutions into reality

Honestbee makes fitness easy with its newest section.

MANILA, Philippines — With every new year comes a slew of fitness resolutions. January is always the best time to pick up new health habits. Everything just seems so fresh, so possible. We set high goals for ourselves that come with equally high demands — fitness classes twice a week, strength training thrice a week, intermittent fasting, strict diets. What we fail to realize is that we have to start small.

Sports performance nutritionist, registered dietician and fitness coach Tim Ting agrees, “Most diets fail because people try to tackle too much, too soon.” According to him, the best way to get started on a sustainable diet with long-term results is to follow the 80-20 rule. Eighty percent of your daily meals should be healthy and wholesome and 20 percent of it should be what he calls “awesome junk.” While it may sound counterintuitive to allot space in your diet for sweets, fast food and other guilty pleasures, coach Ting maintains that it’s important. Doing this helps curb cravings and in doing so, stops us from binge eating. While the mere existence of that 20 percent allotment is great news for most of us, we know that the remaining 80 percent is still difficult to achieve. Healthy, wholesome, unprocessed food takes time to make. Meal prepping is crucial.

“The only way to lose weight and lead a healthier life is to make more conscious choices of what you eat,” says YouTube vlogger Marga Banaga. She suggests going through Pinterest and YouTube for meal prep ideas — a lot of them are surprisingly easy to follow and yield delicious results. She also recommends buying your ingredients via Honestbee, the online grocery delivery service, citing that after finding our her local wet market was on the app, she started spending less than P100 for broccoli — something that used to cost her over P600 with every grocery trip. The app has made healthy living a little more convenient through its new “Organic, Fresh, and Healthy” section that lets you scroll through its restaurant and grocery merchant partners offering a wide range of healthy products. Plant-based drinks and snacks, locally-sourced produce, organic fruits, carb substitutes and more are all available and neatly organized under one tab. Banaga suggests prepping meals for two to three days at a time to ensure freshness — not a problem when fresh groceries are just a few taps away.

Sports performance nutritionist, registered dietician and fitness coach Tim Ting shares the best way to get started on a sustainable diet.

According to coach Ting, pairing healthy meal prepping with “small, purposeful exercise” should be enough for someone who wants to develop long-term healthy habits. Jogging and yoga are good starting points before diving into strength training and other more rigorous workout routines.

Small, simple — that’s the best way to begin the fitness journey. In fact, if meal prepping still feels like a huge burden, Honestbee makes things even easier by partnering with several diet delivery services. Muscle Kitchen Manila, Fit Fuel and Ketos of Manila are also accessible through the app with a weekly cutoff of Friday, 5 p.m. for registration.

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Download the Honestbee app on the Apps Store on the Goople Play Store.