Health & Fitness
How To Take Your First Steps Towards Health
Let's talk about how you can take your first steps towards really making a difference with your health.
Hello, everyone! . It was about how making positive changes to your lifestyle was all up to you.
Diane Anderson, one of my clients, recommended that I write about some ways to get started. I agreed, so here we go!
The first thing you must do is figure out your goal. I mean a specific goal. "I want to get in shape" is not a specific goal. "I want to lose 15 pounds in the next two months" is. It is specific and time bound.
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That's means you know what you want and you have given yourself some accountability and a sense of urgency. Once you have a set goal, everything else is much easier.
It's like the conversation between Alice and the Cheshire Cat:
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"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.
"I don't much care where—" said Alice.
"Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.
Alice has no goal so it doesn't matter which way she goes. If Alice said she wanted to go to the Target at the Bayfair mall then the Cat would have told her to get on the I-580. It wouldn't have been as good of a book, but that's beside the point.
Once you have a set goal you need to develop a plan to get there. If you want to lose weight then one of the first things you should do is look honestly at your diet.
Research has shown that when it comes to changing habits, the fewer habits you change at once, the much greater the chance of success. In other words, don't try to change everything at the same time.
Pick the one thing that you feel will make the biggest difference and dial that in 100 perecent. Is it that you are eating a bagel and cream cheese for breakfast and you know that you should be eating eggs? Is it the daily mid-afternoon Snickers bar? Whatever it is, commit to the change, nail it every day for a week or two and move to the next one. Build on your success.
Here's another big thing: If you don't know how to develop your plan or what you might be doing wrong, find someone who does know what to do. If I want to build a house, I might know that I want three bedrooms, two bathrooms and a hidden passageway to my top secret laboratory, but I don't know how to get the permits for that thing that conducts the power of lightening into my test subjects so I need to find someone that does.
One more thing. Do something. Even if you're not sure it's the 100 percent best thing to do, at least do something. I can gurantee you won't get any results from plotting your next move for months. Just get on it!
In my next blog I'll give you some of the most common problems that I see when working out and how to fix them. Please let me know if you have any questions. Have a great day!
Mitch Rothbardt, CPT, PN Lean Eating Coach
510-754-7113
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