January is flying by! How are your resolutions holding up? Back on track with a training plan and eating plan? That’s right, eating plan.
Let me ask you this…have you ever achieved exactly what you wanted without putting together a plan for getting it? When you’ve just been winging it and seeing what happened or reading a book and waiting for osmosis to get it done?
Does it work?
I didn’t think so.
When it comes to learning a new way of eating and successfully making it a natural part of your everyday life is not going to be a walk in the part and you shouldn’t expect it to be.
When I teach concepts here at ELEVATE, I try to keep it as simple as possible. There is no need to complicate things unnecessarily. However, it’s often not the eating concepts that are the challenge for our clients. It’s the implementation that is the biggest challenge, because it takes planning, preparing, cooking, tuning into their bodies, all of which, require them to step up, commit, and make some real changes. It puts the responsibility on them, which can be a very scary thing.
I would love to be able to follow around each of my clients and talk them through each decision they are making and shop and cook with all of them. How fun would that be!?! I’d love it! But that’s not reality, so it comes down taking responsibility for your own success and being honest with yourself when you don’t.
Here are 5 tips to making it happen this year:
Know the facts: learn the truth about food, eating, and your body so you know what the good choices are and what the bad choices are. Many people go through their days thinking they make good choices, when in fact, they don’t. A great way to learn is through our group program, starting in Feb! Check it out here.
Make a plan: make a plan, make a plan, make a plan. This can be in many forms, same as your training plan, but you need to make one! If you don’t know what this looks like, try breaking it down the way you do for training. Every plan starts with a goal. What’s the goal for the week or block? Maybe you decide to cook 3 meals at home each week and add more vegetables to every meal. Keep going until you have the completed plan for that time period.
Attention: every day make it a point to put attention towards the plan. See it, think about it, visualize yourself doing it! It doesn’t have to be a lot of time spent here but do what you can to put attention on it. Maybe you wrote out meals you will make for dinner each night as part of the plan. Put it somewhere you will see it every day. Keep making the plan (and updating it) even if you don’t take action. One day you will.
Effort: create an action item for each day that you will execute towards the plan. Maybe one day you cut up extra veggies and pack with nuts and seeds for on the go. Or maybe you buy that new green vegetable that you’ve seen at the store. Make it fun and give yourself rewards along the way, like stickers or buying those new running shoes you’ve been wanting.
Celebrate: Most important is to celebrate every time you make progress. This can be as simple as a fist pump or happy dance recognizing to yourself the joy you feel when you are accomplishing this goal.
It can sound like a lot of work if you let yourself think about like that, but if you want to see changes in your life you have to be willing to MAKE CHANGES! What a crazy concept!