Achieving a healthy lifestyle won’t happen overnight. The key to success is simple: Take baby steps. Don’t expect quick results. When you do seek immediate results, you set yourself up for disappointment because you will fail.

Wow! That was super motivational, right? No. Just being honest. Looking back at your life, did you go from a vibrant, fit, healthy young individual then out of nowhere end up with a spare tire and unable to run a single mile without getting winded? What brought you to this point in life? Small changes in your daily routine and eventually overtime, wham, you are out of shape. Simply put, you have developed a lifetime of bad habits.

Road to Success

Make little changes you are able to stick.  Do not try to change habits all at once.  Demanding too much from yourself results in changes that rarely lasts longer than 1 month. Think back to your last New Year’s resolution.  How’s that working out for you? 

Pick one bad habit in your daily routine.  Focus only on turning that bad habit into a regular good habit.  Once you have successfully accomplished this transition, you may repeat choosing a different bad habit.  This will lead to long term success.

Example :

If your work requires you to be stationary for extended periods of time, start incorporating 5-10 minute walking breaks every 60 minutes. It’s a simple Mindful Axn that will help you get in those steps.

Consider This :

If you don’t already have an activity tracker, invest in one. Some models have a feature that will alert you when you’ve been idle for 60 minutes. This simple tool keeps you accountable plus seeing your progress throughout the day can be quite motivating. My preference lies with Garmin products.  Here’s a link to purchase a reliable activity tracker which has a bar indicating if you’ve been idle too long: https://amzn.to/2EpfdpV 

Steps to Kicking Bad Habit

• On a piece of paper or maybe even a journal, list all the bad habits you would like to conquer.
• From that list, choose the bad habit you feel you will be most successful at changing.
• On sticky notes, put reminders in key areas around the house, your car and maybe even your office reminding yourself about the goal you are working to achieve.
• Every night before going to bed, think through your day and ask yourself whether you made progress towards changing that bad habit to a positive healthy one. You might find it helpful to journal in the evenings writing down each night how you feel about that day’s progress towards your goal.
• After one week, evaluate your progress.  Do you still find yourself having to work at not doing the bad habit? Have you completely kicked the bad habit? Or, are you somewhere between these scenarios?
• If you’ve kicked the bad habit, it is time to go back to your list of bad habits. Pick your next one to kick and repeat above steps.
• If you are still working at making the bad habit a good habit without conscious effort, stay with the current goal.  You are not ready to move on to the next goal until you find it is easy to avoid the bad habit. 

Summary