Building Healthy Habits
5 Easy Steps
One of the most rewarding things Jane and I do is on every Thursday night we host a weekly support meeting with those who are striving for metabolic healing. Not everyone is there to lose weight. We all have the goal of achieving better health.
The last two meetings have focused on creating healthy habits in our lives. Whether it be walking, moving, writing, meditating, yoga, exercise, reading…we talk about ways to make it happen so we can begin to fill our lives with things we enjoy! We broke it down into 5 easy steps.
First, create a habit that you would enjoy. Choosing something that you really hate is not going to help you create a habit that would be long lasting. Choose something that you know would benefit you and that you would enjoy!
Second, make it realistic. If you don’t regularly exercise, don’t set a goal of exercising 45-60 minutes a day. Maybe just 5-10 minutes a day would be a good start. One of our group participants wanted to start doing pushups but wasn’t very good at it. So she set a goal of doing 10 wall pushups at a time.
Third, make a trigger to remind yourself to do your task. The goal was set to do 10 wall pushups every time she went to sit at her desk. If she walked away from her desk for whatever reason, before she sat down, she made herself do 10 wall pushups. Someone else really enjoys writing, her trigger is 10 for 10 which means10 minutes of writing at 10am every day.
Fourth, set a special place for the activity. For writing, a special chair, at a special area of the house with a special pen and notebook. This was her writing spot.
Fifth, celebrate your victories. Maybe it will be a simple loud shout of “YES!” with a fist pump. Don’t make your celebration food based though. Maybe it’s finding an outfit for ever 1-3 weeks of the successful activity. Whatever it is, you should be proud for keeping up with it.
I chose meditation. I do it before I get out of bed every morning. Maybe it’s just coincidence, but I have been told that I leave the house on a happier note. I’ve also had one of my best weeks of sleep.
Whatever it is, make yourself better and “Getter Done”!
Dr. O