TRY IT: Set SMART Goals for Health and Fitness

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:

• Couch to 5k
• 100 pushup challenge
• Weight training 101

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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TRY IT: Start a New Health Habit for Lent

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Given how hard lifestyle change is, you should take motivation where you find it.  Although Lent is traditionally about sacrifice and self-denial, exercising self-discipline with any healthy habit is in the right spirit.

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Making A Habit

Although opinions differ on just how long it takes to form a habit, committing to change for the 40 days of Lent will give you a great foundation for sticking to your new practice.

Ideally, you want to go with something that you’ve already thought about and feel ready to undertake.

Believe it or not, the part where you think about changing without actually doing anything is part of what makes you successful when you do take action (not that I’m saying you should put off getting healthy so you can think on it).

The next step is to figure out how you are going to do it.

There’s nothing magic about making a change during Lent; it’s still going to take dedication, discipline and some planning.

Write down what you are going to change and what that means to you, in detail.

Tell someone about your commitment and sign up for HabitForge where you can get a daily email reinforcement of your goal.

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Pick A Habit, Not Any Habit

This is literally going to start tomorrow, so don’t pick something that is going to take loads of equipment or planning.

Start with the thing that you were going to do anyway. That you’ve been putting off. That you know just really needs to change.

A few ideas:

• Eat 5 fruits and vegetables each day (get thee to the supermarket).
• Take a walk every day after dinner.
• Burn at least 1,000 calories per week in exercise (that’s the American College of Sports Medicine’s recommendation. Seriously.)
• Track your calories every day of Lent using DailyPlate, FitDay, the USDA, your fancy ass “smart” phone, or a piece of paper and a pencil.
• Give up take out, or vow to cook dinner every night from fresh foods.
• Get at least 8 hours of sleep every night.
• Try a new active hobby every week – bike riding, gardening, doing ANYTHING with children…

What healthy habit are you taking up for Lent? Do you think 40 days is enough to make a permanent change? How will you make sure that you stick with it? Let me know in the comments!

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TRY IT: Scare Yourself

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One of coolest things about the internet is the ability to very quickly educate yourself on even the most obscure of topics.

Want to become a professional clown? Make lamps out of recycled newspapers? Become an expert on the mating habits of beetles? The web is there for you.

It can also be a pretty scary place – full of conspiracy theories, health scare sites and an unbelievable amount of spam.

If you can’t tell the difference between information and conjecture, this advice probably isn’t for you.

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Use It to Your Advantage

If you’re reading this blog, you probably have at least some experience with web research.

You pick a topic. You do some searches. You waste 6 hours of your life reading websites about who’s wearing what to the Oscars.

This is no different.

The topic is your health. Your lifestyle. Your family history. Your risk factors.

If you are overweight, find out what the probability is that your kids will be too. If your dad had a heart attack, find out what your odds are.

Insomniac? Find out how that’s related to your weight. Veggie hater? Track the nutrients you are missing from your diet.

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Make it Matter

The more you read about your personal health risks, the more likely you are to start incorporating positive change into your lifestyle.

It may take some time to sink in, but treat it like a school assignment and I’m betting you will learn some things that make you wonder whether that third Krispy Kreme was really worth it.

To get you started, here are some reputable and informative sites on health issues:

• National Institutes of Health
• Mayo Clinic
• Centers for Disease Control (they’re more than just ebola)
• World Health Organization
• WebMD (diagnose that rash while you’re on there)

Of course, there’s Google for checking out your specific health topics but try not to end up on the “saccharine gives you alzheimer’s” websites. There are plenty of them out there.

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Have you ever tried to read up on health issues to scare yourself straight? Does fear work as a motivator? What tidbit of information had the most influence on your lifestyle choices? Know any other good places to read up on fitness and nutrition online? Let me know in the comments!

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TRY IT: Pay for Skipping the Gym

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The Freakonomics segment in the New York Times today highlights a trial program in Boston that financially penalizes gym members for skipping a workout.

Gym-Pact works with pre-existing gyms to offer members discounted rates. The catch is that you have to show up to your agreed upon workout sessions or be fined for the missed workout.

The program allows you to decide how often you hope to work out and also what your personal fine is for missing a day (the minimum is listed on their website as $10 for a single workout and in the NYT article as $25 for failing to turn up in any given week).

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Money Where Your Mouth Is

This is an outstanding idea for aspiring gym-goers who need a little bit of external motivation.

Most of the time skipped workouts are a question of inertia rather than any real conflict. Providing an immediate form of motivation – rather than promises of long-term health or weight loss – could get you off the couch even when you sort of don’t really feel like it.

Allowing you to choose your own punishment is also brilliant and reminiscent of the income-adjusted speeding tickets in Europe. The penalty needs to mean something or the behavior won’t be modified.

With the ability to change your penalty level during the program, you can also feel out your own sweet spot, raising your charges until you know you won’t miss that zumba class.

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For the Rest of Us

You’re probably wondering how this helps you since chances are you don’t live in the Cradle of Liberty (I didn’t make that up).

You can start by encouraging your gym to join Gym-Pact but short of an instant nationwide expansion, you’re probably going to have to DIY this thing.

Find a sibling or frenemy who would love to take your money and make a deal with them. You bring proof of gym attendance back (stamp from your gym, heart rate monitor results, a photo of you sweating all over that day’s newspaper) or they keep your hard earned cash.

This could also be fun for a group of friends or small office. Everyone who skips a workout adds cash to the pot which can is raffled among the participants who DIDN’T miss any workouts that month. Or you could share the bounty and have an office pizza party!

No, seriously, you can’t. I forbid it.

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Lots of people reward themselves for working out with new clothes, gadgets or equipment for sticking with an exercise program. Have you ever pre-planned a punishment if you skipped workouts? What are other ideas for negative reinforcement besides paying a fine? Do you think parting with your cash would get you off the couch or are you lazy enough to pay for playing hooky from the gym? Tell me what will work on you in the comments.

TRY IT: Focus on Immediate Benefits

This one is inspired by the blog “Blond and Balanced.”

START A SNOWBALL

Have you ever heard of a debt snowball? My cousin introduced this concept to me as she and her husband were trying to pay off a lot of debt from college and starting a family.

Traditional logic has you pay off the highest interest loans first.  So, if you have a 15% card, a 10% card, a 6% mortgage and a 4% student loan, then that’s the order you pay them off in.

The “Debt Snowball” ignores the logic of saving money and instead focuses on something that Americans are very fond of – immediate gratification.

If you like something, you keep doing it, right?

So, the debt snowball has you pay off the lowest BALANCE first. Then you get the warm fuzzies from that success and want to keep on attacking your debt.

A little off-topic, but this TRY IT works the same way.

FOCUS ON TODAY

One of the top motivators for getting healthy is to prevent disease and increase longevity.

Right, we all want to live a long time and not as decrepit old people.

Unfortunately, our human brains are really geared toward pleasure now instead of reward later.

So, while you’re still working towards a long, healthy life, focusing on benefits today might keep you climbing on to the treadmill and putting back that second donut.

WARM FUZZIES?

If there is anything you like about exercising and eating right – anything at all – focusing on that might help you keep making good choices.

Here’s Amber’s list of immediate workout benefits, maybe some of these apply to you:

1. The satisfaction you feel after a workout. The “aftertaste” as she calls it.

2. Unwinding and stress relief after a long day.

3. Not feeling like crap for skipping a workout.

4. Considering that you’re just going to waste that hour anyway (be honest, you were going to watch Survivor or some crap like that).

5. Creative inspiration. Having time to yourself is pretty rare. You might actually *think* of something.

6. Or you can use working out as an excuse to get out and see people – with a buddy, in a class, stalking that guy at your gym…

So what got you off the couch today? What reward do you get from making the right lifestyle choices? Better sleep? Workout afterglow? Not having to run to the bathroom after chowing down on a fist-full of deep-fried “food”?