Tag Archives: behavior change plan

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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

More About Milestones

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I had a few more thoughts on milestones that I wanted to share.  When setting targets for your weight loss milestones you don’t necessarily have to use weights.  Since a weight loss program combines making changes in your eating habits and your activity level, there are many none weight targets that you can use.  In fact many people find that concentrating on changing the behaviors that will lead to reaching their goal weight to be a better strategy than just focusing on their ultimate weight loss goal.  After all, attaining a 50 pound weight loss will take time, but a milestone tied to changing some aspect of your eating habits can be reached much sooner.  For instance, let’s say that snacks are your downfall, and you typically eat 6 unhealthy snacks every evening while sitting at the computer or watching TV.  A milestone for you could be to eliminate 1 evening snack per week for the next 5 weeks.  By the end of those 5 weeks you will have decreased your snacks to one each evening and hit that milestone.  At the same time you need to improve the healthfulness of the snacks and not increase the amount of each snack.

Once you reach your milestone, you reward yourself.  This brings up the other point I wanted to make about using milestones.  You can choose any reward except food.  So, buy a new pair of shoes or go out to a play or movie, but don’t go out to dinner or have an extra slice of pie for dessert.

Finally, it should be obvious that when you use the attainment of a changed behavior as a goal as in our example, you need to continue that behavior and build on it.  Most experts say that you need to work at maintaining that behavior change for at least six months before you can consider it part of your lifestyle.  With that in mind, you may want to set monthly milestones that you will maintain the new healthier behavior that you adopted in order to prevent backsliding.  And that brings us to the topic I’ll talk about next time – backsliding.

Meanwhile be sure to set attainable milestones for your behavior change program, whether for weight loss or smoking.  It’ll make it more fun as you chart your progress towards your goal.

For Your Health – Dr. Bob

Making Milestones Work For You

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Usually when we are making changes to our lifestyle behaviors we have set a goal for ourselves that won’t be attained for many months.  Once we reach that goal we usually reward ourselves.  In fact, often the attainment of our goal is the reward in and of itself.  The sense of accomplishment is powerful.  Very often, our goal is related to getting a benefit or reward.  For example, a woman losing those 50 pounds she set as her goal may enable her to feel more attractive and confident when she attends her college reunion.

But if we just tie a reward to attaining our ultimate goal, we can lose the value of some motivational opportunities along the way.  This is where the concept of milestones comes in.  When writing out your plan it is a smart idea to identify some milestones along the way & link them to some small reward.  For instance, for the woman in our example, she may want to set up 10 pound milestones as she works toward her 50 pound weight loss goal.  She would tie a reward for every 10 pounds she loses.  It may be going to a movie or buying a new blouse or sweater.  Whatever reward she values would work as long as it doesn’t involve straying from her eating plan.  Ideally you should tie a due date to each milestone to help you stay on track.

So be sure to harness the power of milestones.  After all, we all respond to rewards.

For Your Health – Dr. Bob

Barriers to Your Success

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Whenever you take steps to change your lifestyle behaviors, whether to stop smoking, eat healthier or begin an exercise plan, it pays to take some time and identify the barriers to your plan.  These are the roadblocks to your success.  They are usually easy to list since they are often related to your list of Cons.

So if we consider the healthy eating plan that must be followed to lose weight, barriers might include:

  • Not knowing what to eat and what to avoid
  • Not knowing what are proper portion sizes
  • Not understanding food labels
  • Having difficulty finding the time to do some research on proper nutrition
  • Being tempted by unhealthy snacks at work
  • Being a frequent snacker
  • Eating out frequently, possibly due to business travel

Barriers to starting an exercise program to help lose weight and for its other benefits often include:

  • Having difficulty finding the time to exercise
  • Not having access to a place to exercise
  • Being embarrassed to exercise in front of others due to self consciousness about being overweight
  • Physical limitations

These are the potential reasons why you may fail in your plan – if you don’t determine how you can overcome them.  So when you make your list of barriers, you need to list next to each barrier what you will do to counteract them.  This way, when you are faced with the barrier, you will know how to respond.  For instance, if you are unsure of what to eat and what to avoid as well as appropriate portion sizes, you need to do some research online or at the library.  To help with portion sizes, you may need to buy a scale and measure all your portions.  When you take the time to identify your barriers you can usually strategize how to eliminate them before you are faced with their challenges.  Including barriers and their solutions in your plan preparation can help assure your success.

Next time I’ll talk about a few more important parts of your healthy lifestyle behavior change plan.

For Your Health – Dr. Bob