Maintaining your Own Health as a Busy Parent

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When you have children, they generally become your priority. You’ll do everything within your means to give them the best quality of life and the greatest happiness possible. You put their health, happiness and wellbeing first. This is completely understandable. But you do need to remember to look after yourself too. Maintaining your own health should be one of your priorities anyway, but you should also consider that you need to be in good shape to care for your kid too. Here are just a few ways to fit in caring for your health in spite of your busy and hectic schedule.

Maintain Your Routine Health Checkups

We should all attend routine health checkups and it’s important that you make sure that you attend any recommended appointments with healthcare professionals. Way too many parents take a look at their hectic calendars and decide they simply don’t have time for these appointments. Some forget them entirely. Others will have all intentions of going, only for something else to come up last minute and cancel. But you do need these opportunities for a healthcare professional to survey your general health, identify any symptoms or warning signs of problems and offer routes to resolve your health if you need them. Some examples of check ups you need to attend include visiting your dentist once every six months, your optician once every two years and cervical screening every three years (if you’re aged between 25 and 49) or every five years (if you’re aged 50 to 64). If you don’t have time for certain checks, there are at home health tests that you may want to see if your doctor recommends.

Provide Yourself With a Good Diet

Many parents are guilty of making their kids nice, healthy and balanced meals, then not doing the same for themselves. Perhaps you cook your kids meals and just eat their leftovers or pick at the ingredients while you’re cooking. You might make a nice, healthy meal for your kids, then turn to takeaways, ready meals and other convenience options for yourself. It’s essential that you hit your calorie count and avoid nutritionally void foods that contain high levels of saturated fats, salts and sugars. Start making portions that are big enough for you to have some of the healthy foods you’re providing your child with, or meal plan and create healthy meals that are for yourself and better suited to your tastes. Meal prepping can help with this, allowing you to chop vegetables, marinate foods and generally largely prepare meals for the week in advance. This can make eating well between the school run, commuting, dropping kids to hobbies and more a lot easier and more achievable.

Exercise

It’s recommended that the average adult gets one hundred and fifty minutes of moderate aerobic exercise a week. Are you hitting this goal? If not, you need to incorporate some exercise into your routine. Try at-home workouts that you can engage with while your kids are home or that take less time to commute to.

These are just a few suggestions, but each can really help you to lead a healthier and happier lifestyle. Give them a go and work them into your routine!