After a busy year, many of us tend to have that similar excitement for the summer time. Our kids are out of school which means less after school activities, we’re not waking up as early often, and we just have a lot more free time in general. Plus, when vacation comes along? We’re ready to go fully into rest and relaxation mode.

While all of these feel-good summer moments are amazing, a lot of us tend to lose a lot of our structure during this time. So, how can you stay on track with your fitness and weight loss goals, but still enjoy all that the summertime has to offer? Here are a few tips.

Change your mindset about what it means to be on vacation.

What comes to mind when you think of vacation? It may just simply be the need for a break or unwinding, for others it may be the rest, relaxation, and relief from our busy lives. We may have an increased need to want to blow off steam and to do this, many of us often resort to food and alcohol as our go-tos. 

For so many years, society has correlated unwinding and vacations with indulgence in food and alcohol. So, the key to enjoying a true vacation without losing track of your goals is to shift away from this mindset. Ask yourself how you can still get that same enjoyment without using food and alcohol as your main resort.

What if it’s spending more time with family, or having more quality time and enriching those relationships? What if it’s self-reflection or seeing new things and visiting new places?

A mindset shift about what it means to enjoy our vacation could be the beginning of turning that around.

What do you need now in your everyday life, and how can you cultivate that on vacation?

When we talk about vacation, we talk about “getting away” from the things in our regular life. Why is it that we need to get away from it all on vacation? This could mean that there are some things that are lacking in our regular life that we aren’t getting enough of. 

The first step is to get to the root issue of what it is that you need more in your everyday life. Is it more rest, more self-care, more self-reflection and less restriction? 

Once you’ve identified these things that you are lacking in your everyday life and make it a point to practice it more, you won’t feel the desire to have to wait for vacation to meet those needs when they can be met in your life now. Think about how you can start to take care of yourself all of the time rather than using vacation as that opportunity. 

That way, when you’re on vacation, it’s a lot closer to your day-to-day life, and you can enjoy it to its maximum potential. 

Start living your life now.

The summertime and your vacation deserve to be enjoyed, but you don’t have to wait until vacation to feel your best! 

It’s so easy to derail our progress during the summertime, but enjoying our vacation does not have to correlate with doing this at all. It can be a time to get more in tune with ourselves, a bit more than we do in our daily lives, and give our mind and body what it truly needs during this time. 

So, start living your life now so that this summer, you can enjoy that vacation and come back feeling closer to yourself, your family, and enjoy life’s experiences to the fullest.