Success in Strategy
Eat healthy and be active.
This is not new information and certainly something we all know we should be doing; yet I know so many people, myself included, who don’t and aren’t. We get comfortable in our ways of life and push things to the tomorrows full of promise that quickly become yesterdays of missed opportunity. So many times I have told myself “tomorrow I will give up [insert any food item that is bad for you]” or “Monday is the day I will start [walking/running/exercising] again.” And every one of those tomorrows and Mondays has come and gone having seen very little, if any, change in my habits.
At the end of my first week with Eat Healthy Be Active, I find myself focusing on strategy. Before this, every time I have tried to change my eating or activity level, I jumped in without a sense for how I was going to do it. When I would inevitably miss a day of exercise or eat something I had said I wouldn’t (mainly chocolate…it’s my weakness!) mentally I would go to “this isn’t working,” “I can’t do this,” or my favorite “my health isn’t that bad…I can always try again later.” However, this thinking gets me nowhere on the journey to a healthier me. What I need to succeed is a strategy that allows me to see and celebrate my successes. A strategy that gives room for missteps and creates a path forward from them.
The Eat Healthy Be Active program helps facilitate participants’ strategies. No two participants are asked to go through the program in the same way. This is because the program is teaching you to implement change in manageable ways that work with your lifestyle. The tips are simple enough, such as lower sodium intake, but they are powerful in that Merlin pairs them with real life examples for how to implement them. Participants are not left to figure it out on their own and they are not expected to implement everything all at once.
Rather than focusing on adding everything I am learning into my life all at once, I took this first week to focus on increasing my water consumption. This created an easy to achieve and succeed at goal that started me off in a great way. Changing your lifestyle is similar to hiking a mountain. The idea is really lofty and inspiring. You know how amazing you will feel when you accomplish your goal and get to the top. However, if you start without a plan…if you are not prepared with the proper gear and supplies, the task may become overwhelming and impossible. You begin the climb and find yourself focused on the inability to reach your goal versus the end goal itself. Should you prepare though, you will have the tools to work through the difficult parts and find yourself at your end goal by creating strategic, manageable goals along the way.
So this week, I focused just on water and I succeeded in that first step! I invested in an infuser to add real fruit flavor to change it up from glass to glass. This week also didn’t go according to plan as I ended the week with a stomach bug. I couldn’t eat much of anything let alone focus on making sure they were the healthiest choices. Thus, having a simple goal for the first week also allowed me to find success in unplanned for circumstances and carry the momentum into my second week! For the first time, a major setback is not derailing my health journey. Having a strategy of making small changes that work with my lifestyle is allowing me to succeed at changing my lifestyle to be healthier and more active.
As I work through my second week with Eat Healthy Be Active, I will be looking at my meals and searching for simple “swaps” to make my favorite foods healthier. I may even find a great recipe to share!
If interested in learning more about the program, follow the link below to our Eat Healthy Be Active page: