This is a guest post by Ashma Gomber. Ashma is currently working with Hewlett Packard India. She is an electrical engineer by profession, an avid reader and a loving mother.

It is wisely said that a healthy mind stays in a healthy body. Similarly, healthy parents bring up kids who will be healthy adults in the future. We, who were healthy and lean during our school college and even pre-parenthood days, tend to make “our” health and fitness the last priority in the daily hustle bustle of our lives.

As parents who are most of the time burdened with the demands of parenting, it is very easy to neglect our health. Haven’t we all at the end of the day reached out for that yummy cookie, piece of cake and extra chocolate bite for comfort? We tend to tell ourselves that we deserve the feel good factor that fatty food brings in as we are constantly stressed out due to increasing demands of our kids.

This occasional indulgence becomes a norm for us and before we realize we start carrying few extra kilos on our poor knees. We can probably recall the innumerable times we got ourselves enrolled in that Yoga class or tried to hit the gym and soon enough lost steam and started looking for excuses for not going!

Eating healthy and exercising will not only make us feel better about ourselves, help in keeping doctors at bay, but also expose our children to healthy habits. Kids who see their parents make healthy choices in food are more likely to do the same in their later years and will be more open to exercise. With the increasing incidence of heart diseases, hypertension and other lifestyle related diseases in the populations across the world, I am sure that all of us would want to give our kids a healthy future.

Well, let bygones be bygones. We can always start now.

In the new year 2013, I am sure many of us would have put fitness as one of the resolutions to be followed strictly. So let us make a fresh beginning to eat healthy, and exercise not only to fit in our old clothes but also for general well being of our body. Let us start by taking tiny steps. A recent report in a newspaper said that every extra hour that we spend in front of TV, we are cutting 22 min from our lives. So to start with our motto should be

1. Walk, walk and walk.
2.  Take stairs instead of elevator wherever possible.
3. Keep track of what we eat, esp between meals.
4.  Make an appointment to get the Health Checks done.

Lets try to do these simple things for now and see how it improves our sense of well being in a few weeks’ time.