How to be healthy or doing the work to be healthy is not hardest part. Hardest part is to keep motivated ourselves for that.
We usually start exercise and dieting with bang but pretty soon we find good reasons to eat Pizza or skip exercise schedule. If you are software developer, most of time you have tight deadlines to fix bugs, build is broken, unplanned meetings or celebrating team events. Ultimately you have reasons to skip exercise and dieting.
Find Motivation
Everyone has his own motivation factors, you need to find yours. You need to find reasons to stay healthy. Take some time to think and find what motivates you to be healthy and how to keep motivated for that. These factors will help you to push out from chair to go for exercise. When you will see Pizza or oily foods, these motivation factors will remind you stay away from those.
You can set monthly and weekly goals and post graph to your wall. Once you will meet weekly goal and see your positive progress towards your monthly goal, it will keep your motivation high. You can also set some small and big rewards on meeting every goal. For example, if you meet 2 weeks goal, giving yourself small treat and on meeting monthly goal, some big treat like purchasing running shoes or going out for dinner. These rewards will also motivate you to achieve goal.
Just Do it
Sometimes you are totally unmotivated, but still you need to stick with your plan and have to do it, no matter how you are feeling.
When you wake up in morning, that is not a time to decide whether you should go for exercise or not. When you reach office or in party and that is not a time to decide whether you should eat yummy foods or not. Try to decide in advance and no matter how you will feel at that time, you need to stay with course.
Use these decisions when you are not motivated. These planning and decisions will help you to stick to your plan. When your motivation is back, you will feel happy that you are still on right track. So remember principle “finish strong” and go for it.