Make little changes first.
Write down a list of things you want to change or improve. Maybe it's your diet or your spending habits or your exercise routine. Maybe you want to be a better listener, be more compassionate. And sometimes, you may want to change all of those things. Whatever changes you want to make, write them all down.
Go through the list and find the one thing that's the easiest to change. Once you've chosen it, now write down a list of things you need to do to make the change happen and then, again, pick the easiest one.
Work on that one thing. Make it the center of your day. Focus on it. Apply your time and energy and resources to it and then tackle the next thing.
So, let's assume the thing you want to change is your weight (well, to be more accurate, you want to lose some body fat). A typical list of things to work on to lose body fat might be:
- Eat cleaner and eat enough. (Remove processed foods, excessive fatty foods, sugar, and unhealthy snacks. Reduce or eliminate alcohol. Eat a protein rich breakfast. Hydrate.)
- Exercise.
- Get a physical exam by your doctor to find out if there's any reason you should not exercise.
- Pump iron.
- Walk, jog, play, cycle, swim. Get active.
- Manage stress.
- Create a vision board.
- Identify unhealthy triggers. (e.g. smoking and drinking alcohol tend to go hand in hand.)
- Start a food journal.
- Get enough sleep.
There might be more but, from the list, which one would be the easiest to tackle first? Usually, changing your diet and starting an exercise routine at the same time, which a lot of people do, is tough to keep both things going. What if you chose to visit your doctor first? Check that one off the list. Then, maybe create a vision board or look at your stress levels and how you manage them currently. The vision board is something you can come back to from time to time for inspiration and if you study how you manage stress, you might find that you eat more or drink more or smoke to cope with the stress.
As you check things off your list, you're on your way. When you get to changing your diet, use the same principle of little things first. Maybe just stop eating ice cream at night or potato chips with your lunch or have water instead of Coke. Just do that for a while then add something else.
You will lose weight just from doing something as little as cutting Coke (or other soft drinks) out of your diet. An average sized soft drink is 155 calories. If you have one per day (and most people drink way more than one), in one week that's 1085 calories. In a month, that total is 4340 calories or 1.2 lbs. of fat. Stop the Coke, drink water, lose fat and you haven't even started to exercise yet!
The tough thing about making a change is how hard it is to execute day to day; to repeat the choices over and over. That's why you'll enjoy more success if you start with small changes first.
A little change can become a big change. Just give your self a chance.
DK
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