Summer of Becoming the Healthiest & Happiest You! (Part 5) FINAL
Throughout this summer, this blog series of Summer of Becoming the Healthiest & Happiest you! went through how you can be the healthiest version of yourself! In every blog I stated what the purpose of this series was, and it truly was about learning how to change the way you eat, move, and feel by the end of summer 2021 to feel your healthiest!
Part 1 started everything off with setting your personal goals for the summer and being able to reflect progress throughout the summer. Some goals may have not been met and that’s okay. Sometimes we look at the way our future looks to us and set too high of goals too fast and they are hard to reach.
Part 2 dove into how to be physically healthy by your own standard. Exercise the amount that you feel happy with or what exercises make you feel the happiest and most confident about yourself. Being healthy means something different for every single person and setting yourself up for success by defining your own version of health is important when working on your overall health.
Part 3 discussed the eating side of being healthy by your standard and to eat how you wanted and what made you feel best. Not defining your eating habits to a diet but focusing on what foods made you feel good.
Part 4 goes through the ways to relax and take time for yourself as well as get back to your hobbies. This part discussed how hobbies can be very beneficial for your mental health whether they are social or spent alone.
Finally, part 5. This final part of the series will be for those who have followed along through the entire series and use this as your guide to reflect the summer and how you felt that you grew, if your happiness changed, your healthy habits, and if you got back to your roots and got back to some hobbies. This final section of this series is not to make you feel sad or angry at yourself that you didn’t reach goals and if you did reach your goals, you should feel very accomplished and able to set higher goals for yourself!
Even if you didn’t meet your goals, you likely met other goals that you didn’t even know you were going to meet at the start of this summer. Likely you have accomplished something that made you feel accomplished this summer whether it was in your health, physical fitness, getting back to some of the activities you love, or just relaxing and finding inner peace.
In each blog of the series, I included a different healthy meal idea, a few no equipment exercises, and some fun activities to keep you busy. I hope this summer you allowed yourself to reflect and relax from the stress of student life or took extra time with your friends and family!
Self-reflecting is a positive way to help you remember why you worked so hard to improve habits and attitudes about yourself. Reflection will allow closure and help you continue growing from your mistakes.
So, lets dive in and take time to reflect on our summers together. (I recommend writing your reflections down in a journal or notebook so you can remember your growth!)
- What were my goals for this summer?
- Which goals did I have success completing and which ones did I struggle to obtain and why?
- How can I eventually reach the goals I missed by setting myself up for better success next time?
- What goals did I set that were too far reaching and how can I make it a more reasonable goal for myself?
- What did I accomplish that I did not set a goal for?
- How will I continue the goals I accomplished into the fall to keep myself happy and healthy?
- What was the hardest goal to reach and how will you better set yourself up for success in the future?
- What did you overall learn about yourself this summer?
- What lessons or take-aways will you continue to work on throughout the fall?
- What are your new strengths that you learned this summer that you will carry into the fall?
I hope this summer blog series helped you in some way to change the way you define health and happiness in your own way. The goal around this whole series was to help those reading to discover what it means to be healthy physically, mentally, and emotionally specifically for themselves and not what defines happiness or health. Everyone is different therefore everyone is happy and healthy in a different way than someone else.
Strive for progress not perfection!
Kayla Withrow