Take Care of These Three Key Components of your Health If You’re a Woman over 40

There are three key areas to look after when it comes to your health. And very often, we can get very wrapped up in weight loss or fitness. And it’s a really, really nice idea to take care of yourself and take care of the three main components of your health.

Your fitness, your nutrition and your mental health. And if you can tap away at all three every week, you’re going to become a really healthy, more calm, more feelings of capability and in control, if you focus on the three things and not just more one than the other. Because you see, when you focus more on one than the other, other things start to drop.

If you go all crazy out on the fitness, you’re going to get really exhausted and feel really cranky. Same thing goes with the food. If you go all out with the food, you’re going to end up getting really frustrated and annoyed and it’s going to make you feel like you’re going around in circles. Because when you focus too much on the food, you get really obsessed, right? You have your breakfast and you’re thinking about what to have for lunch. You have your lunch, you’re thinking about dinner. You have what you think is a bad night and you get so annoyed with yourself that you feel like you’re starting over.

And the same thing when it comes to your mental health. If you’re only focused on meditation or journaling and you’re not getting any movement and you’re not taking care of yourself from a food perspective, again, you’re going to have a bit of a knock on negatively in other areas of your life. So in my opinion, the best way to take care of yourself is just to look at those three components of your life and ask yourself, “How am I getting on with the food? Am I nourishing myself well most of the time? Am I eating healthy most of the time? And am I having a nice, balanced, healthy day?”

The same approach when it comes to the workouts. “Am I getting good movement throughout the week? If I’m a woman over 40, am I taking care of my body? Am I doing some form of strength training? Am I building lean muscle? Am I making my bones strong? Am I actually moving, getting sweaty and getting good cardio fitness?” And then when it comes to the food, you would just want to ask yourself, “Am I eating healthy? Am I actually taking care of myself?” And forget the unhealthy habits for the minute. Because you can be healthy and have unhealthy habits. And I think that’s where a lot of people go wrong in the sense that they quit or they give up on themselves because they have these unhealthy habits.

Whereas actually, it’s a really, really good idea to focus on your healthy habits and see where you could improve. And then over time, focus on any unhealthy habits that you feel are holding you back. For example, you might leave long gaps between meals. So you might decide to yourself, “Okay, well next week, I’m going to make sure I have a good breakfast lunch and a dinner.” Now, you might be comfort eating alongside of that, but that’s okay. That doesn’t have to take away from the fact that you’re going to focus on having more regularly well-balanced meals throughout the day. So the two can go hand in hand.

So just don’t worry if you are eating crap on the couch late at night and you haven’t figured that out yet, or if you’re going crazy still at the weekends and you haven’t figured that out yet. Just remember that that doesn’t take away from the good work that you do during the day with your food. Keep it nice and simple. Keep it so simple and keep focused on being healthy. And over time, you’ll feel so good, you’ll get brilliant results and it’ll really empower you to want to do more if needed.

If you’ve any feedback or just want to say Hi, please post in the comments and you can also grab my free 5 Day Workout Series of my 5 Favourite workouts of all time here

Jessica Cooke X

About the author 

Jessica Cooke

I love drinking coffee, and my favourite thing in life (apart from my family) is to empower women to lead fitter, healthier and happier lives. (oh, and also I love playing with my two Miniature Schnauzers, Buster and Ozzy)

I’ve coached more than 6,140 women over 14 years to lead fitter, healthier and happier lives.

  • Jessica, since I discovered you and your excellent advice, I have started to feel motivated to improve my overall health. I have suffered mental breakdown on 3 separate occasions but have been doing well now mentally for a good few years. I am however totally overweight and want to tackle this in a constructive manner. My main motivation is to look well in my clothes and to start feeling confident. I love your approach to health.

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