How has your summer been? Have you been able to keep up with the mainly healthy lifestyle that you enjoy or have holidays, children, visitors and unusual routines affected how you have eaten and the exercise that you’ve done?

Have you been left feeling a bit frustrated, disappointed, lethargic, ‘blobby’ and not as vibrant and healthy as you were?

How can you recover from this and ‘get yourself going again? Here are 3 tips:

*Recognise that this is completely normal and these dips in your activity and healthy eating will happen occasionally as they are a natural part of life. It’s how you recover and what you learn from them that matters. What could you have done differently? Or are you happy and accepting of the occasional indulgences or lower activity levels as it brings you other benefits?

If your ‘dips’ are regular and really throw you off track continuously, making you feel guilty and struggle to maintain any kind of healthy lifestyle, then your goals or lifestyle could be too strict. We want to be living in a way that we can maintain for life and so a good idea is to aim for 80% of the time healthy, natural foods complemented with daily activity and 20% of the time recognise the world that we live in and lives that we lead and have some flexibility with your diet and activity levels.

*Get used to drawing lines quickly as this is what enables you to move forward afresh. If you get a puncture whilst out driving the wise and sensible thing to do would be to get it fixed and carry on. It wouldn’t be to stop, think ‘I’ve blown it now and so I might as well slash the other 3 tyres’ and then wallow in pity! But how often do we continue to make things worse when we feel that we have ‘messed up’? Your dips may continue for weeks or even months but concentrate on reducing your recovery time to days or even minutes and you will reap the rewards and barely notice any interruptions to your mainly healthy lifestyle.

*Use the experience to work out what you really want…Why are you frustrated? Is it because it’s not how you REALLY want to treat your body? This is a great place to move on from. You have a better idea of what you want and how you want to move and eat. What changes can you make to do things differently right now? Can you arrange an exercise session with a friend or commit to a class? Can you have a break from drinking alcohol for a while? Can you eat more vegetables and plant-based foods? What can you do now to start feeling better? Because only you can do it.

After a ‘blip’ take some small steps to move forward and give it a couple of weeks to start feeling better, it will then be like it never happened and you will reap the benefits of your healthy lifestyle once more!