What can we do to set ourselves up for an enjoyable and healthy summer as we hit the warmer weather of spring? Health and fitness guru Laura Hulley has the answer.

I’m not trying to instil panic or wish the year away, but with only a few months left of 2024, how can we best harness the time to level up and be the best versions of ourselves for 2025? Here are some straightforward and easy ways to feel our best coming into the New Year.

Have an established exercise routine

If you are currently not active whatsoever, that is absolutely okay. You just need to start from the ground up and build from there. For example, start with aiming for one exercise session each week for the first two weeks. This could be a morning walk, a bike ride, a sports game, a gym class or absolutely anything where you’re getting your heart rate up and being active. If you’ve successfully added an exercise session to your routine, aim for the next two weeks to build that to two sessions per week and so on and so forth until you feel as though you’ve found a happy balance of active time throughout your week.

For some people, three exercise sessions a week is achievable and enough to make them feel good and see progress toward their goal. I would personally suggest three as an absolute minimum. If you are already doing three or more sessions a week – well done, keep it up!

Work on that water intake

I personally am an absolute shocker with my hydration and know I need to do a lot better. It is so easy to go through the day without one glass of water. I often find myself panic drinking water at 8pm, feeling dehydrated. This is obviously not ideal. If you are similar to me, then let’s work on this together. I have actually bought myself a new drink bottle that shows water targets for the different times of the day, which keeps me aware of how much water I should consume throughout my day.

Health guidelines suggest that women should aim for around 2L and men 2.7L of water a day. If you are active or sweating a lot, you will need to drink more water to replace that. This is also where your electrolytes can come in handy to replenish the lost salt/sweat throughout your day.

If you are currently drinking the bare minimum amount of water, try to slowly build this up. Aim to have a glass when you wake up, a glass with morning tea, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner, and a glass before bed. That would bring you to seven glasses of water a day, which is a bit below the recommended guideline. I find basing my water intake around meals helps to remind me to drink throughout the day and boosts my overall intake.

Set a good sleeping routine

I understand that as a trucker, your hours can be long, varied and unpredictable. But it is so important to get in a good sleeping routine to the best of your ability. If you can go to bed and get up at similar times of the day each day, your body gets into a nice rhythm and isn’t woken in fight or flight mode or getting confused with such varying amounts of sleep on a daily/nightly basis.

What you do around bedtime is also important. If you are nose-deep in a screen right up to the moment you shut your eyes for sleep, you are going to still be stimulated and possibly struggle to drift off to sleep. It’s so important that you give your eyes, body and brain a break from screen time before you go to bed. If you can, aim for one hour screen-free before bedtime. I think you would benefit hugely and hopefully see an improvement in the time it takes you to fall asleep at night.

Similarly, when you wake, if the first thing your eyes and brain see is a bright blue screen, you are starting your day with an abrupt panic. Give yourself half an hour to wake up, make yourself a hot drink and try to take things slowly – your body will start the day in a more relaxed way.

Find a good eating regime

Now this one is obviously a lot easier said than done and is the biggest challenge for 90% of my clients. There is so much to it and so much confusion around it. Exercise takes up maybe one hour of your day, five days a week. But nutrition is 24 hours a day. Every moment that you are awake, your nutrition is a priority. Life throws us all sorts of unexpected moments and events, so it’s no wonder we cannot keep our nutrition on track at all times – nor should we aim to. It’s important to throw out the window the ‘all or nothing’ or ‘perfection’ mentality around our nutrition. If we can aim to eat well 80% of the time and enjoy ‘treat’ foods 20% of the time, then we are doing absolutely fine.

Our eating regime is similar to our sleep and exercise routine – we need to find a rhythm that suits us. If we can be creatures of habit and eat at similar times each day and include similar elements in each meal, then it will make it a lot easier on ourselves.

It is also helpful if we aim to incorporate our main macros or food groups in each meal. At breakfast, lunch and dinner we want to try and include a carbohydrate, a healthy fat, and a protein. For example, breakfast could be toast, avocado and eggs, lunch could be rice, mayonnaise and chicken, and dinner could be potatoes, mince and sour cream. And don’t forget a truckload of fruit and vegetables!

It doesn’t mean we have to eat the same foods every day, it just means the structure of our meals are similar. If you do find it easy to repeat the same meals a lot, then go for it – I know I do!