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7 Excuses For Not Starting Up Your Weight Loss Diet
Changing habits is one of the most difficult challanges we human beings are facing. This also applies to changing food habits, and especially starting a weight loss diet, when you are used to eating what you want when you want it. When we feel...
HOW TO DO THAT "GLASS-HALF-FULL" THING
One morning a couple months back, my seven year old daughter
came downstairs in the morning with a terrible case of the
grumps. This was no little "got up on the wrong side of the bed"
mood, this was a full scale grouchy "don't even look at me...
The Book that Changed My Life
There was a little girl, born into a world of alcohol and violence. There was neglect, poverty, gossip and betrayal. The negative emotions all ran rampant. She saw her father beat her mother in the head with a hammer. She saw her father cut her...
The French Paradox
THE FRENCH PARADOX
In the mid-1990s the world's oldest inhabitant - a 120-year-old woman living in Arles in Provence - gave a television interview during the course of which she attributed her longevity to three things: using olive...
Top 10 Reasons Why Low Carb Dieters Can Get Fatter and Fatter
Low Carb at TGI Fridays! Low Carb Ice Cream! And the best one - Low Carb Beer! I was ecstatic. Low carb had finally become mainstream! Life would be good from now on… I’ve been on the Atkins low carb diet for years, but was shocked to find earlier...
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Healthy Weight for Life: The 5 stages of lifestyle change
So you’re determined you’re going to do something about your weight. But what? Losing weight is not in itself a behavior. Releasing fat pounds is an outcome of many behaviors that add up to consuming more calories than your expending. (Yes, there’s a genetic component too, but you can’t change that.)
The good thing is that this gives you lots of places to start moving toward your goal of losing weight. The challenge is sorting through them all and finding what will work best for you. So here’s the question: What are you most ready to change?
Behavioral researchers have identified five stages in behavior change:
1. Precontemplation: You’re not even considering it. No way you’re gonna give up your pizza and beer. Gym-going is not for you. Why walk when you can ride?
2. Contemplation: Well, maybe you could live without pizza and beer *every* week. Gym is out, but you always liked swimming, maybe a pool. The walk in the park with your friend was pleasant last weekend, maybe you could do it again.
3. Preparation: Next week you’re going to skip that pizza. You found out the local Y has a pool and their family rates are affordable. You talked to your friend about doing more walks sometime.
4. Action: Two weeks and no pizza. You joined the Y and you’ve swum laps there a couple times. You and your friend have gone walking the past three Saturday mornings.
5. Maintenance: The weekly pizza has
been a thing of the past for six months. Swimming is so much a part of your daily routine that you don’t feel right if you skip it. Those Saturday walks are don’t-miss tradition.
In fact, this readiness to change model is behavior-specific. That is, you might be in the action stage with the pizza but still in precontemplation on that exercise stuff. You’re not likely to be very successful if you flog yourself for not swimming laps every day, what you want to do is move yourself to the next stage: List the pros and cons of regular exercise and guess what, you’re thinking about it and that means contemplation.
So think about the behaviors you can change to lose weight. What stage are you in for each of those behaviors? In each case, what can you do to move yourself to the next stage? What are you most ready to change.
We explore readiness to change in my free teleclass, “The Real Skinny on Weight Loss: Don’t Diet, Do It.” You can get details and register at www.teleclassinternational.com/catalog.phtml?keywords=MH-RS
About the Author
Michael Hallinan overcame a lifelong obesity, and the midlife discovery of health and fitness so changed his life that he established a coaching practice specializing in helping others find their own healthy way to a healthy weight. For more helpful tips, subscribe to the Healthy Weight Newsletter. For past issues and to subscribe see
www.healthyweightcoaching.com/Ezine.htm
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