Tag Archives: changing habits

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Introducing Health-e Thoughts Text Messages – To Help You Change!

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Even before you start your weight loss plan it quickly becomes clear that things will have to change for you to become successful.  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. 

With that in mind, I developed a web site to help support anyone in their journey to reach a healthier weight.  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

For example, if you find one of your greatest weaknesses involves eating unhealthy evening snacks, you could set up text reminders to occur at certain times in the evening for as many days as you want.  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. 

Click here to read more details.  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

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

 

Check Out the Weight Loss Plan Components Page

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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