Environmentally Friendly Lifestyle Habits

Living an environmentally friendly lifestyle hasn’t just entered the mainstream psyche when it comes to general consumerism. It is fast entering as a top health and wellness trend.

From gyms built with recycled materials to wellness spas hawking organic beauty products, the demand is clear.

More and more people want to become environmentally friendly in all aspects of their lives, including their health and fitness.

So, here’s how you can live a more eco-friendly lifestyle.

environmentally friendly lifestyle habits

It’s far easier than you think to make small lifestyle adjustments to contribute to the health of our environment. Here are some unconventional but powerful eco-friendly lifestyle habits to implement today.

1. Eat Less Meat

There’s no lifestyle change that you can make right now that will have as large of an environmental impact as eating less meat. Eating vegetables over meat cuts your carbon footprint in half, according to a large UK study that tracked the emissions of 55,000 adults.

With food production responsible for 25% of the greenhouse gases heating up our planet, even foregoing meat one day a week will reduce your food footprint by 15%.

Additionally, we highly recommend watching The Game Changers Film to learn more about the health (erection size and duration included) and environmental benefits of plant-based eating.

Curious about alternative meats? My brother-in-law sent me this riveting read, ‘The Beginning of the End of the Beef Industry.‘ If you haven’t tried an Impossible burger yet, they’re delicious and easily located on their website. 

The first time I ordered an Impossible burger, I tried to send it back because it looked so real! Furthermore, you can also replace meat with vegetables and beans. If you want to be super eco-friendly, here’s a really easy guide to learn how to grow vegetables in your kitchen.

Eating less meat going forward will make you more eco-friendly. Additionally, you can be more eco-friendly by increasing your quality standards. Only buy the most quality meat products. That means buying organic when possible, grass-fed (and grass-finished), non-GMO, and cage-free.

ButcherBox is an excellent source for high-quality meat. They deliver for free from their collective of farms where they raise animals responsibly. If you use our link to sign up, we earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. You’ll also get 2 pounds of free ground beef in every monthly ButcherBox for the life of your membership.

Read more: How to eat more vegetables.

2. Bring Your Workouts Home

What’s more environmentally friendly than working out in your living room? Now that we are all self- isolating due to the coronavirus, you’re probably finding yourself forced to learn how to work out at home effectively. 

We love our home gym for many reasons. Not only is it a positive behavioral trigger to get you exercising, but a home gym also saves you time and money (for us, $5,000 in 6 years). Plus, with passenger cars making up 42% of transportation greenhouse gas emissions, you cut out unnecessary commuting.

Let’s run the numbers on that. Alex and I have worked out at least 20 times a month over the last 7 years. If we each drove 3.7 miles (the average according to Men’s Health) to the gym each time in a EcoBoost Ford Fusion, we would have driven a total of 12,432 miles consuming 460 gallons of gasoline.

By working out at home we have saved 4.56 metric tons of CO2 emissions.

We also love to buy our home gym free weights second-hand off of Craigslist (a reasonable price is $0.50/pound) So, it’s also recycled! 

If you want to try the best at home workouts out there (based on the data in our review), we have a 2-week free trial here.

3. Reusable Water Bottles (Plastic Is OK)

Using a reusable water bottle is the classic “save the world” entry point, but many are still scared off by plastic. We carry with us our reusable Nalgene and Blender Bottles, however, if we have a plastic Aquafina bottle, we’ll reuse that too.

Believe it or not, before we were coaches, we were both plastics engineers. We met while working for a plastics company. While you should reduce disposable plastics in your life to be environmentally friendly, plastic is not something to be feared. What’s more, plastic does a lot of good since it’s processed at relatively low temperatures and reduces emissions through significant weight savings and part consolidation that might otherwise use metal. 

There is plenty of fearmongering spread around about the safety of reusing plastics. Rest assured, all disposable food containers and plastic bottles are thoroughly tested to meet FDA-requirements for leaching.

We haven’t seen any food containers using BPA in the past decade (and we worked in China for 3 years!) So, if you end up with a disposable bottle, don’t worry about using it ten more times before recycling it, yes, even with hot water.

4. Keep Your Yoga Mat An Extra Month

The ultimate environmentally friendly lifestyle idea? Don’t buy the new yoga mat. Or the new outfit. Or the new gym bag. Keep using the things you already own. And if you rarely need it, could you rent or borrow?

Plus, if you work out from home, you can exercise naked for all we care!

After reading The Year of Less, I adopted a technique of waiting to buy something new for a little while longer. As insignificant as this may seem, I’m a firm believer that over a lifetime, everything adds up.

Now, this habit has spread to other areas of my life, including waiting a few extra days before doing laundry to save water.

When you do buy new items, make sure they’re high quality so that you don’t replace them as often. Here are a few wellness products that we’ve used every day for years that are still holding up well.

YOGO Yoga Mats
SPRI Resistance Bands
MyPillows for Travel
Sleep Masks

Read more: Take our 30-Day Declutter Challenge.

5. Run Your Sneakers Into The Ground

No, you don’t need to throw out your running sneakers every 300 miles.

Throughout our high school careers, our track coaches warned us to buy new running shoes every 300 miles. The reasoning was that the padding and soles wear out.

However, after running half a dozen marathons in my favorite minimalist shoe, I realized that this wasn’t necessarily the case.

We tried out minimalist shoes after reading Born to Run and loved the experience immediately. You feel the texture of the ground underneath your foot, which is a crazy and refreshing experience. Plus, minimalist shoes strengthened our natural foot muscles.

Vibram FiveFingers are our favorite shoe. We throw them on any time we run, exercise, or hike, even including multi-day treks like this recent one to the Lost City of Colombia.

We recommend trying minimalist to level up your running. Just note that you need to work your way up to running with these or any minimalist shoe as they use different (and often dormant) muscles.

If you want to give FiveFingers a try, read our below review and reach out to receive our special offer.

6. Turn Veggie Scraps Into Vegetable Broth

This is our favorite idea to live a more eco-friendly lifestyle. 

What’s better than unlimited, homemade vegetable broth to elevate your cooking game? We now cook all of our beans, rice, stir fries, and soups in broth to bring a new level of flavor.

Take your vegetable scraps, like the top of a tomato or the stalk of cauliflower, and throw it in a bowl or bag in the freezer. Every few days, boil up the delicious broth. This pro tip was shared by a professional chef friend who never wastes a scrap of food if she can help it.

You can use the remaining boiled scraps in a compost, or, feed them to your dogs! Our dogs, who wouldn’t eat a raw bell pepper if their lives depended on it, love them soft and mixed into their dinner.

7. Use Manual Food Appliances Instead of Electronic 

Simple acts like unplugging appliances saves a lot of energy. We read a crazy stat in The Independent that 8 desktop computers emit the same amount of CO2 as a passenger vehicle.

For us, a simple way that brings ritual and exercise to our day is using manual appliances instead of electric ones. This includes our coffee grinder, can opener, wine opener, and egg beater.

While simultaneously saving electricity, The Blue Zones estimates that baking using manual kitchen devices burns 145 calories to boot. Honestly, we’ve come to enjoy the process of grinding our own coffee and being more hands-on with our cooking.

8. Work From Home

We already talked about the environmental benefits of working out at home. However, most people’s office commute is significantly longer (about 4X) than their gym commute. 

Ask your company to allow you to work remotely, even if it’s just 1-2 days a week. That alone has a significant environmental impact. Additionally, you’ll quickly find that you’re eating at home more, doing less laundry, and buying new clothes less frequently. 

 If you’ve recently been forced to work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, read these working from home tips to help you adjust to your new at home office. 

Our friends at @halfhalftravel are the true working from home experts. Check out their comprehensive list of articles on learning how to work remotely. 

9. Quit Your Jobs, Move Abroad, And Start An Online Business 

We did, and it’s been working out well for us since 2018. We’re making enough money online to support our lifestyle and living in amazing countries. 

Our new lifestyle has forced us to become minimalists. Additionally, we are living in beautiful homes for free. A strategy that we explain in depth in our TrustedHousesitters Review.