5 Tips to Help Achieve Your Health Goals
It’s the new year and we all want to start out right. So we make New Year’s resolutions and often we make our health a part of that. The funny thing is that every year the first months I always see new people walking or running outside who I normally don’t see when walking my dog. But then give it a month and there is no sight any more of these people.
Some time into the new year, we drop the resolutions and continue with our old habits. Wouldn’t it be nice for once to really implement them? This is why goals should be a major part of the resolutions.
Resolutions are permanent life changes where goals are set to achieve a specific outcome.
It’s hard to make drastic lasting life changes from one day to the other without something guiding you. Setting the right goals can actually guide you to make lasting life changes.
For example your resolution can be adopting a healthy lifestyle. This means changing your food, changing your water intake, starting to exercise, start a meditation practice etc. This can be a lot from one day to the other, it gets overwhelming, you don’t know where you’re going with it, so lot’s of people quit after trying a few days or weeks.
If we break it down there’s always a goal you’d like to achieve with the life change. So ask yourself: “what do I want to achieve with this?” The next step is asking yourself: “what do I need to do to get there?”
We have 5 tips for you to help you Achieve your Health Goals and with that stick to your new year’s health resolution.
Tip one: Set realistic goals
If you set unrealistic goals, you will never achieve them and you will get easily demotivated. A great way to set realistic goals is using SMART goals.
SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time bound.
Be clear and to the point with your goal and make it measurable.To measure you can include dates or amounts or any number. For example you can use weight to measure, size or glasses of water intake. Make the goals small so you are sure you can reach them, This will motivate you to continue. The goals should be relevant, so it will need to take you to where you want to go with your life. And lastly goals work well if you set a deadline.
Tip two: Make step by step changes
This is also part of setting realistic goals. Don’t immediately try to drink 3 litres of water a day. Take it step by step. It’s better to crowd out the bad foods by including good ones, than to forcefully eliminate everything at once.
Also for exercise you want to take it step by step. If you start from 0, you can start by taking the stairs instead of the elevator and maybe counting your steps. Or taking the bike instead of the car. Try to find something that you like doing, make it fun and/or keep it low impact. We don’t need to run a marathon to get into shape. Low impact exercises like yoga, pilates and my new favourite pvolve can get you big results in the long run. Another one of my favourites is bellicon rebounding (trampoline aerobics). It’s fun and low impact but also cardio at the same time.
Getting a dog to walk more makes walking also more fun. So getting a furry friend can definitely help.
Tip tree: Keep a journal
Keep track of your achievements. This helps to stay motivated. Also if there is a moment you don’t see any progress, you can look back and see from where you come. There might not be lots of progress in one or two weeks but if you look back over the month or longer you see that you actually did make lots of progress.
You can keep a food diary, an exercise diary or if your health goal is to meditate or adopt a self care regime you can journal about that.
Tip four: Achieve them with a friend
Get social while you achieve your health goals. It’s more fun to do it together with someone else and it will also keep you motivated. You and your friend will encourage each other, cheer each other on and also keep each other accountable. Some of us who are competitive by nature might make it into a small competition. Hey, as long as it helps you reach your goals, right? 😉
Tip five: Ask for help
Sometimes it’s better if we get professional guidance to achieve these health goals. For some of us it’s hard to do it alone and we need someone to guide us and hold us accountable. When it comes to lasting lifestyle changes, reach out to a health coach. Get into a 6 month health coaching programme and get help with slowly implementing healthy lasting habits.
Or get a personal trainer if that is what you need.
We of Cups of Green actually offer a 6 month health coaching program to help you reach your health goals. We’ll not only focus on the foods you eat (secondary foods) and the exercise you’re doing. Health coaching goes deeper than that. We’ll also focus on what we call primary foods and that is everything that affects us emotionally as well. We often stand in our own way and together with a health coach you’ll also be working through that what has been holding you back from living your healthiest most vibrant life all this time.
Contact us to schedule your FREE health session. We are offering a free first session for you to truly experience what it is like to work with a coach, no strings attached! Sign up and find out if a coach is the right option for you: [email protected]
BONUS tip: Be kind to yourself
Miracles don’t happen over night. Be patient with yourself. All those perfect healthy lives you see on instagram are not easy and most of them are actually fake. In life there are always set backs, so everybody deals with that, no matter how perfect the picture they selected to post may look. Staying healthy and fit takes work as well. Being prepared for this is actually half the work and is what will keep you going. This also means to be kind to yourself whenever there is a set back. It is totally normal. No need for negative self-talk. You can achieve your Health Goals, I believe in you!
