Image: Wikipedia
One of my favorite classes in graduate school was Exercise Psychology.
It turns out that your success in maintaining a healthy diet and regular exercise routine is more dependent on your brain than your body.
There are all kinds of motivational techniques that contribute to your ability to commit to long-term health habits – goal-setting is one of the most effective.
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Goals for Motivation
Setting reasonable goals makes the process of integrating health habits a bit less overwhelming.
Of course, you hope to eat well and exercise for the rest of your life, but it’s not very motivating to plan your workouts and diet for the next 50+ years.
Instead, breaking your diet and exercise objectives into smaller goals can improve your adherence, while making the whole process seem a lot more fun.
Setting goals helps to:
- Increase your enthusiasm for the life-long drudgery of being healthy.
- Prioritize your health habits – you’re more likely to be successful if you tackle losing excess weight before the Ironman.
- Focus your efforts – if you spread your attention across too many changes (10 veggies per day! Take the stairs! Learn taekwondo! Go low carb!), you’re less likely to accomplish any of them.
- Get a confidence boost when you meet your goals!!!
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Be SMART
You may be familiar with these guidelines for setting successful goals:
Specific – set clear objectives for what you want to achieve.
Measurable – define how you are going to determine when/if your goal is met.
Action-oriented – define how you are going to achieve your goal by describing the steps necessary.
Realistic – make sure that it is reasonable to meet your objective in the time allotted…
Time-bound – and specify when you will start on your goal and when you hope to achieve it.
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Following the SMART protocol ensures that you have a better chance of achieving the goals you select.
First, you have to be specific. This means throwing out stuff like “get skinny” or “exercise more.”
Try to think of the real purpose of your goal. Do you want to use food as a way to ensure future health? How about “meet all of the FDA guidelines for nutrients”? Do you want to lose weight? Think in terms of what that will mean when you get there – how much will you weigh? What size clothing will you wear?
Making sure that your goals are measurable – number of servings of fruit per day, numbers on a scale, miles run – means that you’ll know when you get to where you want to go.
The next step is making a plan for reaching your goal, which we will get to in a minute.
You also want to make sure your goal is realistic, which is closely related to setting deadlines. No, you can’t lose 40 pounds in a week and you can’t deadlift 500 lbs by next Wednesday.
You should absolutely go for broke with your goals. If you want to lose 150 pounds, write it down. If you want to win a triathlon, go for it.
The important thing is that you give yourself enough time to achieve your dream.
It might even help if you gave yourself a bit of padding in the timeline to make sure you easily reach your first few goals. It will increase your confidence and make you more likely to stick to the ones that are challenging.
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Break It Down
Once you have your goal settled, it’s time to break it down into mini-goals to help track your progress.
If your goals are exercise-oriented, there are lots of resources that can help. Try:
Weight loss is, of course, one of the most common goals. Depending on how much you have to lose, a weekly loss of 1-4 pounds is reasonable for most people. If you’re trying to get rid of the last 5 or 10, you may need to satisfy yourself with waiting a couple of weeks to see the scale move (set other health goals to focus on in the mean time).
If you are hoping to lose weight, you will need to outline exactly how that will happen – what will you eat and when? Will you track calories? Cut meat? Exercise every day? Take the stairs at work? Your plan should include all the details plus a timeline.
Make sure to record your progress over time to see if you are on track to meet your goal by the deadline.
If things aren’t working out, you may need to re-evaluate if you have been cheating on the plan or whether your goal was unrealistic (or maybe you need more time?).
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Tricks and Tips
Some other techniques that have been found to increase goal-reaching:
- Visualize yourself reaching your goal. How will it feel? How will you look? What will you do next?
- Write it down – writing your goal every day or twice a day will keep it front-of-mind.
- Keep an eye on it – hang your written goal on the fridge or at your computer where you will read it often.
- Make your goals positive – stick to “workout 3 times per week” instead of “stop missing workouts” or “get ass up off couch.”
- Start now. Next week is no better than this week. The sooner you get started, the sooner you will be checking those goals off the list.
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What are your health and fitness goals and how will you achieve them? Have any tips for others trying to set and achieve their own goals? Share them in the comments!!!
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Shut Up and Try It 