Category Archives: Changing Behaviors

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My Alexa Skills Update

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So, I’ve been pretty busy since my last Alexa Skills update! I’m now up to 25 with the certification of Recall The Date by Amazon on March 30, 2021.

Here are my 4 most recent Alexa Skills with a description of each.  Below that you’ll find a link to the updated list with the Skill Names, Descriptions, and Quick Links to find the Skill in your Alexa App.

What Should I Weigh – What Should I Weigh lets you determine in which of the 4 Weight Status Categories developed by the CDC you belong based on your height and weight. If you aren’t in the normal weight category, it calculates your normal weight range and tells you the minimum number of pounds you need to gain or lose to get within the normal range.  It will also give you nutrition and exercise tips, as well as activities you can do to burn the number of calories you specify.

Your Weight Loss Friend – Your Weight Loss Friend provides powerful tools for anyone on their journey to successful weight loss based on where they are on that journey.  Successful weight loss requires changing your eating and exercise habits.  Many experts in behavior change believe there are several Stages of Change through which a person moves as they work towards healthier habits.  Your Weight Loss Friend uses this approach to organize tools to help the user on their weight loss journey. Users can develop their Weight Loss Plan, log their Weights and Exercises, schedule Healthy Text Messages about nutrition, schedule Email Messages to help them move through the Stages of Change, learn what is a healthy weight for their height, schedule Weigh-In & Exercise Reminders, and get information about BMI, the Stages of Change, and more.

Grampa Wisdom – Grampa Wisdom is a humorous glimpse into some of the sayings and quotes as remembered by the developer of this skill, a Grampa himself. Those recollections are not always the sayings with which you may be familiar, but they are meant to be fun.

Recall The Date – Recall The Date is an easy way to log and retrieve the dates of the birthdays and anniversaries of your friends and relatives. After you have logged some, you can retrieve events for a given month or by the next number of weeks you specify.  It will also tell you whether there is an event for the day you open it, as well as when the next event you have logged will occur. These features will occur accurately for Time Zones within the United States and Canada and will be adjusted for Daylight Savings Time through 2030.

Click the link below to go to a table of my Alexa Skills or click the Download button on the right to download its PDF file:

Dr. Bob Alexa Skills March 31, 2021Download

My Certified Alexa Skills

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In my last post just a few days ago I noted that I hadn’t posted for many months before that.  I have been quite busy since January focusing on developing new Alexa Skills and helping several start-up companies build healthcare & non-healthcare applications with a voice component.  I wanted to take this opportunity to post an updated table with all my 21 Alexa Skills, their descriptions, and Quick Links to them in the Alexa App on an Echo/Alexa device user’s smartphone.  Just click on the link of any of the listed Skills to check it out.   In case you don’t use Alexa, I should explain what a Skill is.  Very simply, the term “Skill” is the name Amazon has given to the applications that work with their Echo & Alexa devices.

If I were to categorize my Skills, most of them would fall into one of the following three categories:

  • Humor
  • Organizational
  • Health & Wellness

Let me mention a few of them:

In the Humor category, Our Little Secret, provides a comical peek into what you might be saying in your home.  In it, a fictional brother & sister with psychic abilities give Secrets and Deeper Thoughts.  All the responses are entirely fictitious, but it makes you wonder what you would hear if “walls could talk!”  While the Secrets are free, the user must pay a low, one-time fee to hear the Deeper Thoughts.  Another humorous Skill is Wine Jester in which Alexa gives comical reviews of any wine you may place before her.

An example of Organizational Skills is Your Expert Log which enables the user to log experts that they may have heard about in different professions, such as, physicians, handymen, and others for retrieval later. My Favs allows the user to log their favorite meals and restaurants to be retrieved randomly. Conference Contact Helper was created after I attended a recent conference to help track the contacts made at conferences and the associated to-do list items.

Most of my certified Skills fall into the category of Health & Wellness. These first two were developed to help us focus on the goodness in our world and help improve one’s psychological health.  Kindness Counts lets the user record kindnesses for which they are the doer, recipient, or witness.  Gratitude Log lets the user log three of their blessings at a time.  After they have logged several sets, they can ask Alexa to play three randomized blessings at a time.  Healthy Text Scheduler allows the user to schedule text messages about healthy eating to help them form healthier behaviors surrounding their nutritional behaviors.  Track My Dose was designed to help individuals manage as-needed medications, so they know when to take the next dose.  They can even schedule reminders at the time the next dose can be taken.  Finally, Symptom Helper helps the user organize the symptoms they wish to discuss with their healthcare provider before an upcoming visit.  They answer several questions posed by Alexa, and she organizes that information into a concise statement that can be entered into a custom list on their Alexa App that can be shared with the clinician.

For Your Health – Dr. Bob

Click the link below to go to a table of my Alexa Skills or click the Download button on the right to download its PDF file:

RAK_Skill_Quick_Links_09_24_2020Download

Creating Your Weight Loss Plan – Part 4 Changing Behaviors & Keeping Resolutions

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With 2016 just a few days away, many of us are thinking about making resolutions for the New Year.  Well, resolutions are really behavior changes.  In the context of a weight loss plan, changing behaviors refers to changing what you have been routinely doing in regard to your eating and exercise routines.  You may also think of behaviors as habits.  Your weight is what it is because of your eating and exercise habits.  While your metabolism plays a significant role, your eating and exercise behaviors are the two areas that you can impact to change your weight.  You will either add new behaviors or substitute new, healthier behaviors for your current less healthy ones.  It is rare to just stop a behavior without replacing it.

Adding Behaviors

New behaviors involve adding something to your current activities, such as an exercise routine.  Often the main challenge is finding the time.  For some, it’s in the morning before the main activities of the day; for others, the evening makes more sense.

As far as exercise, the ultimate goal is spending at least 30 minutes most days of the week doing an activity of moderate intensity.  The more time you spend exercising, the more calories you will burn.  It has been recommended by the American Heart Association that from a cardiovascular health viewpoint, those 30 minutes can be expended all at once or in several blocks of at least 10 minutes each.    It makes sense to start slowly, so 10 minutes three days a week may be the perfect starting point for you.

Substituting Behaviors

These often revolve around eating behaviors.  For instance, instead of drinking sugary beverages, substitute water.  While this may sound simple, it takes planning to make sure you do it.  You’ll probably want to buy fewer sugary beverages and have them less accessible, too.  (Ideally, don’t buy any!)  You may need to put notes in your refrigerator on those sugary drinks that remind you to drink water instead.

As you create your weight loss plan, take some time and identify the behaviors you need to change and which ones you’ll tackle first.  Don’t try to change them all at once.  Make a list and change a few more every week or so.

Don’t forget to check out my website www.insightsforhealth.com where you can set up Health-e Texts to reinforce your new healthier behaviors.  To use some of these you must register as a member, but membership is free!

Your comments are welcome.

For Your Health! – Dr. Bob

Creating Your Weight Loss Plan – Part 3 Milestones & Rewards

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Just as you anticipate and prepare for barriers and obstacles to your weight loss plan, you should build in some rewards for milestones you reach during your journey.

Milestones

Milestones can be thought of as mini-goals that you must attain on your way to your ultimate goal.  If your ultimate goal is a target weight loss of 75 pounds over a 6-month period, then you can set your milestones in terms of process measures and outcome measures towards that goal.

Process Measures

In order to succeed and reach your weight loss goal you need to change habits surrounding your eating and activity (exercise).  These habits, behaviors, processes must change.  For example, you can no longer buy any food just because it tastes good at the grocery.  You must read labels and evaluate your choices.  As far as activity, you need to get on a routine of scheduled exercise.  So a milestone for eating habits may be consistently keeping a food diary or consistently reading food labels at the grocery.  As far as exercise, a milestone could be exercising for at least 30 minutes a day at least 3 days a week for at least a month.  Where possible, you will want to increase certain aspects of your new behavior to set a new milestone for yourself.  This is often done with exercise.  After a month of 30 minutes a day 3 days a week, you may want to increase that to 4 times a week.  But reward yourself as you attain each milestone.

Outcome Measures

These are usually tied to getting to a specific portion of your goal.  So, when trying to lose 75 pounds, your first milestone may be losing 10 pounds.  The next may be 25 pounds.  These milestones help you track your progress and allow you to reward yourself for the work you’ve done.  Changing behaviors isn’t easy!

Rewards

The ideal reward should be tied to the new behaviors you are undertaking.  In the case of weight loss, they certainly shouldn’t be unhealthy or off-limits foods.  So, you may get yourself some new workout clothes or exercise equipment.  For more significant milestones, a weekend getaway might be appropriate but without indulging in foods that are not on your healthy eating plan.  When you hit your ultimate goal, you’ll probably want to treat yourself to some new clothes that fit the new you.

Next time I’ll talk a little more about changing behaviors.

For Your Health! – Dr. Bob

Creating Your Weight Loss Plan – Part 2 Obstacles

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After identifying your Weight Loss Goal, Target Date, Start Date for your weight loss plan and support person, you need to identify potential barriers to your success and, most importantly, ways around those obstacles.  There are actually two kinds:

  1. The barriers that are likely to prevent you from starting your plan, and
  2. The challenges to following through on your Nutrition or Exercise Plans.

Barriers to Starting Your Weight Loss Program

This is a critical step.  Unless you accurately identify those impediments to start your plan and, most importantly, solutions to overcome them, you won’t even be able to start.

What are some barriers that might stand in someone’s way?  Well, for some there may be an upcoming event like a vacation or birthday that they may be inclined to use as an excuse.  For others, it’s the extra time and energy that must be spent in choosing healthier foods for their nutrition plan or needing to identify where they will be doing their new exercise plan.  If you consider each of these, they are solvable through a little extra thought.  You can start your plan during your vacation or just wait to begin after it’s over.  Ultimately, however, you will need to apply your new healthier eating and exercise habits no matter where you are.  As far as identifying nutrition and exercise plans, most people do that research during their preparation phase so on their Start Date they hit the ground running.  I’ll cover these in the next few posts.

Challenges to Following Through on Your Plan

Once you start your Weight Loss Plan, there will often be challenges to your staying on track.  They usually occur more often at the beginning.  As you learn to solve one, that same solution can often be used for others that come your way.  These challenges may arise from schedule changes that you will need to make, such as, when to exercise or where to find the time to keep a food diary?  By identifying these before you start your plan, you can devise strategies ahead of time so they won’t slow you down.  Another common example is what to do at work when there is a celebration where food is served?  Usually the foods aren’t the healthiest of choices.  There are plenty of candies, cakes & salty snacks, but fruit is a rarity.  One strategy is to eat only one or two items while drinking water.  The water can help fill you up.  Should the celebration be one that everyone is asked to bring in something to eat, you should be the one to bring in some healthier choices, such as a fruit or salad tray.

As you try to anticipate these Barriers and Challenges, don’t forget to discuss them with your support person to get their ideas.

If you have encountered any of these kinds of obstacles during your weight loss journey, please share them in a comment.  Looking forward to any comments you wish to share!  Also, don’t forget to check out my website www.insightsforhealth.com where there are tools to Make Your Plan as well as many other features to learn about nutrition & exercise.

For Your Health! – Dr. Bob