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The best ways to keep healthy are to change your everyday habits. These are some changes I've made that have stuck and worked!

1. Don't eat breaded deep fat fried foods: If it helps, think of how gross and greasy they are as all that saturated fat slides around in your blood vessels and gets trapped in your arteries! Regular fried foods are okay in moderation. Everything is okay in moderation, but deep-frying in itself is excess.

2. Don't drink anything with carbonation: Carbonation leeches calcium from your bones, which is associated with fractures in people as young as 13!
3. Don't binge drink; Drinking the same amount of alcohol over a longer period of time is not as bad for your body.
4. Find a buddy or team to work out with and make regular game dates: If someone is depending on you, you're much more likely to follow through with exercise than going it alone.
5. Stop buying unhealthy snacks: It sounds obvious, but control over what you eat is a lot easier before you're at the point where you're about to be eating it.
6. Buy lots of fruit! Fruit tastes great because it's full of sugar, but fructose (fruit sugar) is a whole lot easier for your body to handle than sucrose (refined sugar).
7. Drink tea when you feel munchy: Tea has caffeine, the main ingredient in most diet pills, and it has a more stable form of caffeine which won't make you peak and crash like coffee. Plus it keeps you hydrated, there are lots of flavors, and it has zero calories!
8. Drink cold beverages rather than warm ones: Calories are measures of energy, which often translates into heat. Your body burns calories to heat up cold things so that it can maintain a 98.6 degree temperature. Things with a high specific heat (like water) take more energy to heat up the same volume, so drink ice water as frequently as possible! It also flushes out your system and keeps you hydrated!
9. Have frequent human contact. Human contact adds years to your life! Hug your friends, spoon with your significant other, and read to your kid while he or she sits on your lap.
10. Relax! Stress is behind a great deal of heart disease, the number one killer in the US. People in the US take less vacation than other wealthy countries as a whole. Find time to read a book you want to read on the beach, or to watch a sunset or sunrise. It will help you live not only longer, but better!

Learn more about this author, Samantha Enns.
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