Many people strive to improve their health but often find it hard to know how to get started and how to stay motivated. Everyone knows that being out of condition and having bad habits is detrimental to their health, and this can often be an underlying source of guilt which makes people feel bad about themselves.
No one wants to go through life, thinking that they are damaging their health and harming their quality of life. Therefore, it is vital to make changes towards a healthier lifestyle, but the key to making this a success is to approach it in the right way.
It is estimated that anywhere from 80 per cent to 95 per cent of people that lose weight go on to regain it. This doesn’t mean that losing weight is a waste of time, but it does show that you need to be mindful that making positive changes to your lifestyle is a long term journey, rather than merely a quick fix.
What Do You Want to Achieve?
Before you begin to make changes to your lifestyle, it is a wise idea to think about what you want to achieve. Having a clear idea in your mind of what you want to gain from your lifestyle changes is vital. Knowing what you want the outcome of your efforts to be will bring you a lot closer to achieving your desired goal. A vague idea of merely losing weight may not be enough to keep you motivated, which makes it all too easy to veer off-track and see your efforts go to waste. Rather than focusing on goals related to weight loss, you may want to consider goals that challenge you and benefit your lifestyle—for example, being able to walk up a steep hill near your house with ease or being able to run around the block without stopping. Goals such as these will bring you a massive sense of achievement when you meet them, and will also demonstrate to you the difference that you are making to your health.
Avoid All or Nothing Thinking
A lot of people that start diets and exercise plans fall into the trap of all or nothing thinking. This means that if they eat a chocolate bar while on a diet, they will immediately see it as though they have ruined their healthy eating plans, and give up. This type of thinking is what usually leads to people feeling defeated and then eating more and more chocolate, as they feel they have ruined their diet anyway.
Breaking free from this habit of all or nothing thinking is essential if you are to make positive changes to your health in the long term. Eating one chocolate bar doesn’t make you a bad person, and it certainly doesn’t mean that you have ruined your healthy eating plans. The important thing is to move on from it and to continue to eat healthily rather than giving up entirely.
Getting healthier doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to be able to run a marathon anytime soon; it merely means that you are trying to improve your health, which is different for everyone.
Making Changes
There is nothing wrong with introducing changes slowly and taking a step by step approach to improving your health and wellbeing. In fact, taking things slowly could help you to establish new, healthier habits successfully, such as people that stop smoking and switch to using vaping products such as Vapor North instead.
In the early stages of giving something up, perseverance is critical, but just as your initial habit formed over time, the same will be true of the new, healthier habit that you replace it with. Psychologists believe that the amount of time that it takes to form a new habit varies from 18 days right through to 254 days. While the amount of time does vary from person to person, you can be sure that eventually, your new behavior will become a habit, and will become easier to stick to.
Monitor Your Progress
Monitoring your progress when making changes to improve your health and wellbeing is vital. When you can keep track of the changes you are making and can clearly see the improvements that are taking place, it becomes far easier to stay motivated. In turn, this has the benefit of making it easier for you to introduce even more positive changes to your lifestyle and to enjoy even great benefits to your health and wellbeing in the process.
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