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:

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

You need to change your habits surrounding buying, preparing and eating foods as well as make changes to increase your activity to burn more calories.  So changing habits or behaviors is fundamental to any weight loss program.  Perhaps a more accurate way of putting this is that you need to substitute healthier behaviors that bring about weight loss for your usual unhealthy ones.  You don’t just stop a habit or behavior, you replace it.  Until these new behaviors become automatic you will need to consciously remind yourself to substitute them for your old habits.  You will need to use tricks to help you remember.  With time it will become easier, but when you first start you will need all the help you can get. 

It is www.InsightsForHealth.com and all its tools are free.  It has many features to help you in your quest, and I’ll describe them in more detail in future posts.  But perhaps the one most useful to use when you are trying to remember to substitute your new healthier habits is Health-e Thoughts Text Messages.  These are text message reminders that you schedule yourself to help you change some common unhealthy habits.  They cover:

•          At Home Breakfast
•          At Home Lunch
•          At Home Dinner
•          Exercising At Home
•          Healthy Eating When Out Of Town
•          Exercising When Out Of Town
•          Eating Out
•          Grocery Shopping
•          Morning Snacks
•          Afternoon Snacks
•          Evening Snacks

Then around the time when you are ready to open that bag of chips you would get a text to help you resist that habit and substitute a healthier one. 

If you want to try Health-e Thought Text Messages, just follow the steps to register and in a few minutes you’ll be able to schedule these helpful text reminders to help you make those healthy behavior changes. 

Remember, while we don’t charge a fee for this service, any applicable text message charges from your cell phone carrier will apply.

For Your Health – Dr. Bob

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

Changing any behavior, especially ones associated with our daily lifestyle habits, will take a lot of energy and work.  Everyone has great intentions when they first start a weight loss program or stop smoking.  As they get into the program and realize the difficulty, they often rethink whether it will be worth it.  This is where they need to draw from the strength of their motivation for starting to make these changes in the first place.

In my opinion, it is best to identify your motivations while you are in the planning stage, before you start making your changes.  You need to clearly identify why you are committing yourself to the work involved in changing your target behaviors.  You should write this and all components of your change plan down in a notebook or keep it on your computer so you can refer to it later.

Motivations come in all shapes and sizes.  They can be related to improving one’s health, looking better, being more attractive to one’s partner or wanting to see one’s daughter get married.  They can be somewhat abstract, such as, “I want to feel better” or much more concrete, such as, “I want to stop smoking so I can avoid hospitalizations for my lung disease.”  Motivations can be relatively trivial or much more serious, such as, “My husband thinks I’m too fat, and the spark is gone from our marriage.”  These are common reasons for people to want to change their behaviors.

Again, as you begin to make your behavior change plan, you should identify and write down your motivations. Over the following months as you make the necessary changes you will be faced with barriers to your success.  The strength of your motivations will help you conquer those barriers.  The more meaningful the motivation is for you, the greater its power.

Goals are often related to motivations.  For smoking, it is to completely stop smoking by a specified date.  For the woman who wants to be able to wear a certain bathing suit when she and her husband go to the Bahamas in July, her goal is to lose a specific number of pounds by a specific date, the date her trip begins.

A lot has been written about the characteristics a goal should have.  The concept of SMART goals identifies the key characteristics.  There are some differing thoughts as to what each of the 5 letters stand for, but here is one that makes sense for what we are discussing:

• Specific – What needs to happen by the goal date for the goal to be met?  For smoking, it is usually complete smoking cessation.  For weight loss, it is losing a certain number of pounds or weighing a certain amount.
• Measurable – It needs to be something that you will clearly know that it has been attained or not.
• Attainable – The goal can be reached taking into account the goal date.  Losing 50 pounds in one month is just not safely attainable.
• Relevant – It is relevant to you and your condition and circumstance.  This often ties in with motivation.
• Timebound – There is a specific target date when the goal is to be attained.

As you prepare your plan be sure to use these characteristics in writing your goal. 

Please add your comments on these topics or share some of the motivations you’ve used to reach your own goals.

For Your Health – Dr. Bob

Over the upcoming weeks and months I’ll give you my thoughts about the behavior change planning process.  I have added a page to this blog, the Weight Loss Plan Components page,  that gives an overview of the components of most behavior change planning.  Even though it’s focused on weight loss, it’s useful for whatever behavior you are trying to change.  Weight loss is a little more complicated than most others since it usually includes behavior changes in eating and exercise. 

By the way, think of behavior change as habit change.  Most of the healthier lifestyle activities that we want to add to our lives require changing or stopping our current not-so-healthy habits or behaviors.  Usually the best way to stop one behavior is to substitute another healthier one for the unhealthy one. 

Since you are reading this, you are at the very least considering making some behavior change.  Starting to build your plan will require you to consider why you want to make your change and how will you know you’ve succeeded.  It’s best to spend the time writing your own behavior change plan before you take action.  On the next post, we’ll talk a bit more about goals and motivation.

Regards,

Dr. Bob