Tag Archives: behavior change

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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

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 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

Four Questions Surrounding Motivation

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What is motivation?   I think a useful definition in the context of behavior change is that it is the driving force that will enable you to do the work and make the sacrifices for you to succeed in changing your behaviors for the better.

Where should it come from?  The most effective motivation comes from within yourself.  Changing your behaviors, to lose weight or quit smoking is hard work.  You won’t succeed if you are just trying to please someone else, but, that external validation can add to your momentum.  Even though motivation comes from within, it can have an external component to it.

How do you get motivated?  Ambivalence often makes the decision to change difficult.  Those reasons to change need to be looked at along with the reasons not to change.  You may want to list the Pros & Cons of changing your behaviors.  Divide a sheet of paper in two by drawing a line down the middle.  On one side list the Pros, and on the other, the Cons.  Here’s an example for starting a weight loss program:

PROS CONS
Will look better at high school reunion Will need to buy new clothes
Lower health risks Will need to spend time planning meals
Will get in better physical shape Will need to fit exercise into daily routine
May be able to lower doses of some meds Might feel hungry at times
Less stress on knees, so less pain Will need to stop eating some favorite foods
More attractive
More energy

Usually this exercise results in many more Pros than Cons.  And the Pros are more significant advantages than the inconveniences of the Cons.

Finally, if after listing the Pros and the Cons you are still on the fence as far as changing, ask yourself this question, “What would have to happen in your life to make you commit to making the changes necessary to lose weight?”  Would you need to have a heart attack or develop diabetes?  While you may not be ready to start now, thinking in these terms can help move you along to where you will have the motivation to start.

Let me know what you think!

For Your Health! – Dr. Bob

Questions For Father’s Day – What’s The Motivation? Will It Work?

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I recently saw a post on Facebook with a picture of a young girl, no more than 6 years old, holding a sign that said that her father told her that he’d quit smoking if she could get 1,000 “Likes” for that post.  The last thing she wrote on the sign was, “I love my dad!”

My first reaction was that this is wrong on so many levels.  The father has put his daughter in the position of being responsible for his trying to quit smoking.  If she doesn’t get the 1,000 “Likes” he won’t even try – and to her young mind, it will be her fault!  When he gets sick from smoking & possibly dies before she graduates high school, she may feel guilty because her post wasn’t good enough.

I thought, if the story is to be believed, the father has no intention of quitting.  He just wants to use this as an excuse to continue smoking.  As I said before, motivation has to come from within for it to be effective.  You would think that if he loved his daughter, he wouldn’t need any more “Likes” than her encouragement to quit!  If she gets the 1,000 “Likes” how will that translate into motivation for her dad?  Can dad call any of them to get encouragement when he wants to light up?  Though in my experience this kind of motivation is extremely weak, perhaps this will do the trick for this father, and he’ll feel compelled to keep his word.

Naturally, I was curious about how many “Likes” she did get, so I clicked through to see the original post.  It was originally posted in the Spring of 2014 and when I looked at it, there were over 5.9 million “Likes” and counting!!    I imagine this huge response was on behalf of the girl so she wouldn’t fail.  The ball was in the dad’s court.  Unfortunately, nowhere did I see any update that the dad had quit smoking.  I hope he has.  I hope he found the motivation he needed not from the millions of “Likes”, but from the look of love in his little girl’s eyes and his hope of living a healthier life and being part of her life for as long as possible.  I hope that dad has quit smoking for good so that he & his daughter can enjoy many, many Father’s Days together.

What motivation has helped you adopt healthier habits around smoking, eating or exercise?  Please share your experiences on this blog!

For Your Health! – Dr. Bob