3 Tips For A Healthier 2008
Here are my top tips on How to have a Healthier 2008.
1. Surround Yourself With Inspiration! Around your home, office and wherever you spend lots of time have pictures that make you feel good. Remind yourself why it is so important to you.
We think in pictures so get photos from fun occassions you’ve had, or pictures of experiences you’d like to have. I mix up things up so I have real photos, cut outs from magazines, travel brochures and shopping catalogues. Make this fun so you enjoy the process. I also have tropical smelling candles & oils in my home too. Smell is so powerful and fruit and flowers scents can have you thinking of romance, fun and action.
Create a slideshow - If I find a picture online, I’ll right click and save it to My Pictures folder on my computer and I have a screen saver come up using the pictures from that folder so after I’ve taken a break I come back to my computer and see pictures of my dream house and fun things I’d like to do.
In my kitchen I have a corkboard and on it is a picture of a bikini I’d love to wear. The healthy looking models in the picture are jumping around at the beach and laughing and the women remind me of my friends so when I look at the pic, I keep thinking that’s how I want to enjoy summer. And having it in the kitchen means I’m more likely to take the time to make myself a healthy snack rather than popping out to the store or bakery for an unhealthy treat.
I also have a picture of a hunky smiling guy on my bathroom mirror and that’s a great motivator too! I’m able to vividly imagine what it’s like to have that man in my bathroom giving me that same cheeky grin.
2. Feel Good Do whatever you need to feel good. If you’re an emotional eater like me, remember the focus here is on long term happiness not short term fixes. Yes a pizza will taste good in the short term but it’s taking me further from my happiness in the long term. At the end of the day when I’ve eaten well and exercised there’s a pride that comes from keeping my promise to myself.
Make a list of all the things you like to do to feel good that are not unhealthy. Include things that you can do anytime as well as things you can do alone or without cost so you can feel good anytime you want to. It might be something as simple as wearing your favorite outfit, putting on perfume, watching a funny clip on You Tube (I like the old Whose Line is It Anyway clips), dancing like a rockstar or singing.
Notice & Adapt - Reflect back on your day or your week and see what you’ve done well and what hasn’t gone to plan. Work out whether there is something you can do so that next time that happens whether you can have more options available to you.
If you deny yourself you’ll probably start feeling resentful so it’s important to stay flexible and give yourself options. Sometimes I’ll tell myself, well I wait until Sunday (my zag day) and then I’ll have that pizza I’ve been craving. Or I might compromise and make a healthy homemade sweet potato and fetta pizza (yummo!). The most important thing is that I don’t beat myself up or punish myself.
Zag days are something I learned from Tony Robbins. During a flight, the plane is off course 90% of the time, and the pilot keeps making adjustments, zigging and zagging, until arriving at the desired destination. Likewise, it’s okay for you to go off-course as long as you keep making adjustments so that you’re still on track to your desired outcome. I think Tony gives himself one zag day a month and his wife Sage has added to this a one bite a day rule so she has a bit of chocolate each day.
Now that Christmas is over, I’m getting back into my routine of eating fresh, unprocessed food for six days a week and on the seventh day I am free to have whatever I desire. So during the week as I’ve had a craving for something it goes on my mental list to have on Sunday.
3. Don’t Wait To Celebrate We hear over and over how we need to celebrate each small step. I’d heard the baby learning to walk story so many times I had stopped listening and then for some reason one day it finally clicked! I got it!!When trying something new, if you fumble or don’t do it as well as you would like, are you hard on yourself? Is it okay to do it wrong? We can be so hard on ourselves, not giving ourselves encouragement and appreciation. Give yourself permission to make mistakes.
Celebrating the steps along the way acknowledges ourselves and our commitment. Celebrate by dancing like a little kid for 16 seconds, it floods your body with endorphins making you feel great!
Steps to Celebrate…
Say Jenny wants to eat more healthy food but she eats a lot of takeaway because she’s busy and fast food is convenient. Jenny might have a goal to cut down on takeaways to just twice a week. Here are some examples of when Jenny could celebrate:
- Celebrate when she gets the takeaway but chooses water instead of her normal coke or coffee
- Celebrate when she eats 5 servings of vegetables and 2 fruits in 1 day
- when she goes shopping for food & plans ahead
- finds quick and easy recipes to make at home
As soon as you do something different, celebrate and congratulate yourself. Anything new will feel strange at first but soon by sticking with it and having fun, it will feel more and more natural.
10 Day Trial Tip - I find that when I want to make a big change, if I break it down into something small and tell myself I’m going to just try it out for 10 days, it works much better for me. After all, I’m just trying it out, not making a lifetime commitment and at the end of the 10 days I know whether it’s something I want to include in my life long term, or not.
Keeping your New Year Resolutions:
This short 1 minute video has some great tips for making sure your new decisions last past January.
Technorati Tags: 2008, resolutions, health, healthier, new year, goals, goal setting, fitness, natural, healthy, tips
1 comment December 30th, 2007










