Some people hold back from getting fit because they feel self-conscious about their ability or body and want to find an activity they can do on their own, but organised classes and sports clubs can provide you with much-needed support and motivation, as well as a chance to make new friends. Others feel too busy to take on a fitness activity, yet changing your social and eating habits can be a simple way to promote healthy lifestyle changes.
The festive season is upon us, and that can only mean culinary overload, abandoned fitness regimes and hours semi-comatosed in front of the TV However with a little forward planning and a bit of self-discipline, it is perfectly possible to enjoy the season’s festivities without entering the New Year full of misgivings and guilt. …
I don’t know how many of you tuned in to watch Katie Hopkins earlier in the year telling us easy it was to lose weight and ‘proving’ this to us by deliberately putting on a stack of weight and then shedding it all again in a matter of weeks. I shouted at the TV screen…
Battling another cough or cold? Feeling tired all the time? Taking a daily walk or following a simple exercise routine a few times a week may help you feel better. Exercise not only helps your immune system fight off simple bacterial and viral infections, it decreases your chances of developing heart disease, osteoporosis, and…
Wouldn’t we all love a quick fix in order to lose weight – or maintain our healthy weight easily? And the weight loss industry and the popular media, are very well aware of this! Everywhere we look there are adverts for the latest products expertly designed to enable us to cheat the obesity time bomb…
Exercise throughout a person’s life plays a significant role in reducing the risk of developing dementia, a study spanning 35 years has found. The research by Cardiff University followed a group of 2,235 men aged between 25 and 49 from Caerphilly, just north of Cardiff, since 1979 and found the five factors that were integral…
Physical fitness – How much do you know? Test your general knowledge about physical fitness by taking this test. The answers and explanation follow. TRUE or FALSE? 1. Muscle weighs more than fat. 2. Maintaining physical fitness requires major lifestyle changes. 3. “No pain, no gain” is a workout myth. 4. Weight loss should be…
The sun and rain look very inviting! You happily perch on your sofa with a cup of hot tea and your favorite film is about to start. For many of us, this is a typical start to a weeknight during the early spring months. Don’t wait till summer! it may never happen! Damp wet weather…
Last month it was recorded in the papers that dozens of morbidly obese children had been placed in care because of concerns about their health. Out of 74 who were taken from their parents for their own protection during the past five years, councils recorded that one youngster weighed 23st and eight were more than…
Did you know that people who follow a regular exercise schedule have fewer nights of sleeplessness? It’s true. Insomnia is not a common occurrence when exercise is part of your daily schedule. Exercise also promotes a better night’s sleep by improving sleep quality. When you exercise, you experience smoother transitions between the various cycles and…
Last month we looked at walking and why it is one of the best forms of exercise. You will recall that it is good for us in many ways: it is manageable, enjoyable and helps improve our mental well-being. It is also much easier on the body than high-impact activities like running for whilst running…
THE CHALLENGE OF CHANGE
We all have parts of our life we want to change. Whether we want to weigh less, exercise more, quit smoking, save money regularly, declutter our home, work towards that new job or one of any number of possibilities, it seems that there is always room for improvement. Part of our problem is information overload; in the hazy days of yesteryear we often didn’t know what we needed to do in order to achieve our goals unless we could consult face to face with an expert or spend hours trawling through the tomes in our local library, and experts and books were generally carefully vetted. These days we have the opposite; a few seconds in the company of our favourite search engine will throw up thousands of answers- of extremely variable accuracy - to most questions; the challenge is to know which ‘expert’ opinion to trust.
Given a little experience it is possible to sift out the good stuff, and in the days of fake news and fact checking it has become an indispensable skill that many of us have acquired. So, with some Wi-Fi and a modicum of common sense, we can generally download enough information to learn how to move towards whatever our current goal is with just a few clicks. We know what we ‘should’ do, we no longer have any excuses in that department. The problem is doing it.
We live in a society where it is easier to not reach our goals than it is to comprehensively smash them. We may have the very best of intentions to eat less, move more, spend less, save more, digitally detox, or many other activities that form the basis of a typical New Year’s resolution, but with the food and leisure industries spending millions every year inducing us to part with our hard earned cash it’s an upward struggle. And all of this flies in the face of our most basic neurological wiring – the need to seek pleasure, avoid pain and conserve energy. It really does take most of us all of the self-talk in the world to drag ourselves out to that 6am spin class because it takes a long time to derive any pleasure from it, there is usually much pain involved, and it’s hardly a masterclass in energy conservation, so every nerve ending in our body is screaming at us to stay in bed instead. For many of us those odds are simply insurmountable.
There are so many theories behind the science of behaviour change. One of my favourite ways of looking at this is motivation, which comes down to two things. In order to make a big change you need to perceive it as important enough to take on the mammoth swim against the tide, and to believe that you can do it. Once it’s important enough and easy enough, in the words of LaBeouf you’ll ‘just do it’.
So, whatever it is – how important is it to you at this moment? On a scale of 1-10. I’m guessing it’s more than 1, otherwise you wouldn’t be thinking about it as a potential change to make, and probably not a 10 either, because in that case you would be getting on with it. So more than 1 is great, why is it that high? What would it take to make it even higher? Doesn’t have to be 10, but close to that would probably be enough. Now think about how achievable it is, same questions. What are the barriers? What small changes do you need to make in order to clear the path to the big one? A long, honest look at this might just give you the extra push towards where you need to be.
And lastly, enjoy the process. You can do this. Be your own best friend along the way, and make sure you reward yourself for your awesome success; more about this to follow at a later date!
The Don'ts and Do's of How to Lower Cancer Nearly half of all UK cancer cases are preventable (44%)
. PDF version: pbwf.org/pdfjs/web/viewer.html?file=dontsdosofcancer.pdf