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A Healthy Life, the 4 Basics of a Healthy Life and the 3 Important Habits that Create Good Health
Good health is easy but being sick is hard. The truth is, maintaining good health is pretty simple although reclaiming it takes patience, consistent actions and smart choices. Your body heals at it's own pace. Your job is to help that process...
“Christmas For One: Mental Health Over the Holidays"
My dear friend, poet Dessa Byrd Reed, often spends holidays alone as a widow. However, she doesn’t see this, as many people often do, as a depressing circumstance. In a November 2000 POETIC VOICES interview, she said, “Because I am single and...
Coffee : Poison or Health Elixir?
---------------------------------------------------------- Permission is granted for the below article to forward, reprint, distribute, use for ezine, newsletter, website, offer as free bonus or part of a product for sale as long as no changes are...
Journaling for Health: Five Techniques for Wellness
1. Write about how you feel about everyday events; writing about the events is fine, but be sure to include the feelings. The goal is to get the intense emotions on paper and out of your body/mind.
2. Write about the issues that are most...
The health benefits of taking a sauna
There are many claims about the health benefits of saunas. They are supposed to be good for losing weight, cleansing the body of toxins, lowering cholesterol, relieving the symptoms of arthritis and treating respiratory problems like bronchitis and...
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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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