Out of the five most popular New Year’s Resolutions for 2018, the first two were to ‘Eat Healthier’ and ‘Exercise More’. ‘Focus on Self Care’ came at number four. Every year such health-related resolutions take first place because Self-care, eating healthy food, and getting the appropriate amount of exercise are among the most reliable ways to avoid prevalent health problems such as Obesity, Type 2 Diabetes and Heart Disease. Unfortunately, it is easier said than done, making lifestyle changes takes time, effort, and perseverance.
A survey conducted by the Statistic Brain Research Institute revealed that 27.4% of New Year’s Resolutions fail after the first week. This number rises to 41.6% at the end of the first month. By the end of 2017, only a little over 9% of new year’s resolutions had been kept. Failure is natural and expected when you try to make sudden changes in your lifestyle but keeping some simple things in mind can make it a little easier to succeed at your health goals.
Understand the process. Habits cannot be made or broken overnight; it can take months, or even more time. The most important aspect of this process is the perspective. Instead of forcing yourself to follow your goals strictly, see the act of making or breaking a habit as a gradual process. For instance, if you want to stop eating fast food, think of it as a gradual reduction of eating out. Keep a count of how many times you ate out in the past ninety days and slowly try to reduce it over time.
Make it part of your daily routine. Integrating positive habits into your routine will make it much simpler for you to follow them because doing so subtracts the mental effort it would take for you to otherwise talk yourself into doing something. If something is a part of your routine, you don’t give it much thought and do it anyway. An example of this would be to take the route to work that includes a fitness centre on the way. You can drop by regularly without much thought rather than having to talk yourself into planning an excursion every day to visit it.
The Kaizen Method. The Kaizen method is a Japanese Business Management Principle of Continuous Incremental Change. It is a detailed method to meant to benefit businesses most, where every aspect of a supply chain is involved in making small improvements, but its essence of ‘Continuous Incremental Change’ can be applied to our daily life to by making a small change every day. In this way, you can slowly coax yourself to build habits such as exercising regularly.
Sometimes your mind takes time to familiarise itself with a new routine, so even when you don’t want to exercise you should visit a fitness centre, do just a few exercises and return. You can slowly increase the number of exercises and difficulty over time in the form of tiny continuous changes.
When it comes to unhealthy food, you can start by eating a small fruit before leaving your house, and so on. These small changes add up.
Change the environment. The environment has a significant impact on us. It perpetuates behaviour of certain types possibly because of previous memories and the familiarity of the surroundings. Going to a new place is always a good idea, but that isn’t always practical, so instead, you can make little changes in your surroundings. For instance, if you are in the unhealthy habit of falling asleep at odd timings during work hours, you can install a Standing Desk nearby and work there every time you feel sleepy.
You can also make things a little bit more inconvenient to access. For instance, if you check your email a lot of times, unnecessarily you can install an app that will ask you for a long password every time. This will cause you to abandon the urge to check mail when you have other important work at hand.
Keep a Journal. Keeping a written log of your progress, thoughts and feelings when making changes in life gives you an opportunity to assess your progress and identify the things you might need to modify or change to succeed at your goal. It can also become a strong source of inspiration when you look at the progress made (or lack thereof). If you often skip exercises out of boredom, you can make a physical checklist and tick off exercises one by one. Keeping a physical record will encourage you to complete your daily goals. Maintaining your journal well and keeping it up-to-date is essential.
Learn to deal with the causative agents. Sometimes when you decide to skip exercise or eat out, ask yourself ‘Why?’. Asking yourself why you chose an unhealthy choice over a healthy once may reveal the underlying cause such as stress or boredom. Then you can build mechanisms that help you deal with stress and boredom; this should crop out a lot of unhealthy choices. Knowing the causative agents allows you to make wiser decisions and encourages you to assess the real issue rather than lead you to choose unhealthy options unconsciously.
Find a community. Being among people who share your goals will make it easier to succeed due to the social support you get, just like being among people who frequently make unhealthy choices can push you to make unhealthy decisions yourself. New York Times recently published an interesting article titled ‘Your neighbours, Your Waistline’ about how Military families that moved to areas with high obesity rates tended to gain weight themselves touching on this issue, here is a quote from the article:
“Subconsciously, you are affected by what people around you are doing,” said the lead author, Ashlesha Datar, an economist at the University of Southern California. “When I travel to the Bay Area, for example, everyone is riding bicycles. You get there, and it seems like you want to buy a bicycle. If you move to a community where a sedentary lifestyle is a norm, you join that. There is this social influence.”
Hence, a good approach would be to join a fitness or yoga centre where you can meet others that share your goal, and if that’s not possible then you can join Facebook and WhatsApp groups, or you can even sign up for a forum online. Keeping company, sharing your story and hearing others’ stories is an excellent source of the power required to persevere.
And Last but not the least:
Keep at it. Don’t stop on this journey, no matter where you are and no matter how slow your progress is. Becoming healthy is not a ‘state’ that people can achieve once and forget about, it is a way of life. It may take time to cultivate such an attitude, but everyone can get there eventually with a little bit of work.