I will start “next week”, or “next month” or “after the Holidays” …..
Sound familiar? Lots of us have fallen into this kind of thinking with our health and fitness. We know we need to do something, but there are so many temptations and our lives are so busy, we figuratively put making that change “on hold” and try not to think about it.
Too often for many of us, pizza beats salad and television trumps working out. These choices become our habits and it feels next to impossible to reverse course and change your behavior.
Fortunately, it is much the same way with healthy habits. I have found that when I make small positive choices regularly, those choices become ingrained in my lifestyle. Suddenly, it isn’t so hard to convince myself to wake up in the morning and go for a walk or push play for Core De Force, T25, or the 21 Day Fix. And that salad—it’s part of my daily lunch routine. Making the unhealthy choice begins to feel foreign, in a similar way to how healthy decisions once felt.
As we face the Holidays and the New Year, now is a good time to ask ourselves where we are in the cycle for developing healthy habits.
Habits are created through a defined process. Do any of these steps sound like where you are at with your health and fitness?
1.) Pre-contemplation: You don’t exercise, nor do you have any plans to exercise in the near future.
2.) Contemplation: You’re thinking about starting to exercise.
3.) Preparation: You’ve made plans to exercise and eat healthy in the next 30 days.
4.) Action: You’ve begun to exercise and eat healthy regularly but have been subscribing to the routine for less than six months.
5.) Maintenance: You’ve been exercising regularly for more than six months, and it has become a part of your daily routine.
The goal for all of us is to reach the “maintenance” phase. The way to do that is to begin making small and sometimes seemingly insignificant choices over and over until they become habits — whether you want to lose weight, have more energy or simply improve the quality of your life.
The thing is, no matter where you are in the process, if you want to make change, you need to simply start.
Want to learn more about creating Healthy Habits? Check out my Healthy Holiday Challenge group that starts on December 12th. And stay tuned for more developing Healthy Habit tips.