Happy New Year! As much as I love Christmas, I also love January because it’s such a time of new beginnings. People are often ready to make a change in their life. 

Here are 5 goals your chiropractor (me!) would love for you to set this year. I’ve picked  just the five easy areas of your life that everybody would be so much healthier and happier if they did so without further ado,

1. Drink water. We all know we should, but so many people do not drink enough water. Everybody’s different with their water needs, but an easy basic number is to take your body weight and divide it in half. That’s how many ounces of water you should aim for.  

2. Five to nine servings of vegetables and fruit per day. Most of America does not do this, and that’s the actual recommendation for how many vegetables and fruits that we should be getting. If you only did that this year, it could seriously improve your health. Try to make that mostly vegetables, of course, but fruit also has its health benefits.

3. Try a 30-day food elimination. Most everybody could benefit from 30 days of no sugar and no grains. If you’ve never done that, you have no idea how good your body can feel. We have a 21-day Purification Program in our clinics that comes with everything you need to do this, or the Whole 30 Program is a great way to do it yourself.

4. Move your body more. I treat patients of all different activity levels, and so wherever you are, try to set a goal to increase your activity a little bit. If you’re pretty sedentary, I would love it if you could aim for 10 to 20 minutes of walking every day. Other things that I love patients to do are to go to the pool – just walk in the pool, or do water aerobics. That’s a great exercise that’s gentle on your joints. Yoga is another favorite way of mine to get movement in my body – I always feel like I’ve had a whole-body stretch & strengthening session after yoga.

5. Mental health – work on gratitude or mindset. One easy place to start is to every day, write down three things you’re grateful for. There is a ton of research showing just that will increase your happiness and contentment. Another option is to work on some kind of mindfulness practice, perhaps trying meditation this year. There are great apps out there that make this easy. Yoga is a great way to combine movement and mindfulness.

There are 5 things to consider this New Year! I can’t wait to hear what you’re planning for this year. Happy New Year!