Going on holiday is a stressful business – I usually find that by the time we all arrive at our given destination I really need a holiday, whether or not I needed one a couple of weeks beforehand. From the bikini diet through the bikini shopping (ouch!) to tickets, passports, packing everything necessary for three…
The UK, and in fact Western nations in general, are in the grip of an epidemic in the form of type 2 diabetes; this is not surprisingly generally caused by living a Western lifestyle and is strongly linked with obesity. Obesity rates in the UK have increased 10 fold in the last 40 years and…
Most of us know that losing weight by conventional diet and exercise plans is difficult, and just as many of us know that keeping that weight off in the long term through diet and exercise alone is almost impossible. This is not a new concept – about fifty years ago a Dr Stunkard who was…
My job can be very unpredictable, simply because it is not possible to know with any great certainty what the next person to walk through my door is going to say. I might think that because I saw them two weeks ago, checked their blood pressure and advised them that it needed to be rechecked…
One lesson I have learned since starting work as a GP is that women worry about their periods. A lot. They worry about them being too heavy, long, light, short (trust me, some women actually see those two as a problem!) frequent, infrequent, irregular, painful and a whole host of other issues besides, and I…
Pills and potions can be wonderful things. They ease pain, eliminate infection, lift mood, reduce indigestion, reduce blood pressure, or with the right dose and combination, can have just about any other effect on the human body that it is possible to have. They make my job considerably easier and it is often tempting to…
Every single day that I sit at my surgery desk, at least one patient – and usually a lot more than one – will sit with a resigned expression, sigh and say ‘I know I need to lose weight, you don’t need to tell me’. They say it in a number of predictable situations; sometimes…
Ah, the menopause, such a mixed blessing for most of us. There exists the wonderful realisation that those pesky monthly bleeds are now the stuff of nostalgia and contraception never needs to be an issue ever again, but there can be a heavy price to pay in terms of the hot flushes, mood swings, short…
One of the themes that runs through my life as a GP is that I never cease to be amazed at the rollercoaster lives that so many people seem to have – I have witnessed rags to riches – and riches to rags – stories that would sit very comfortably in any women’s weekly magazine,…
We are constantly being bombarded by the media and health professionals (and health websites!) about the perils of being overweight or obese – the statistics are that at least two thirds of the UK adult population is now in one of these categories, and I now find myself having to use the term ‘healthy weight’…
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