PREPARING FOR YOUR LIFESTYLE RESET
Knowing what you want your health to look like and why you want to make changes are really the first steps to success. Simply stating that I want to be thinner or healthier is rarely concrete enough to keep you going when motivation wanes or strong enough to keep you focused when you’re extra tired, busy, or irritated. You can boost your chances of meeting your goals by having a clear picture of what success means. Focusing on skills, strategies, and habits, instead of willpower, is an important component to long-term success. By examining your overall health goals, identifying your motivators, learning to set meaningful behavioral goals, and setting a plan to develop health-boosting habits, you up your odds of celebrating success. These are the things we begin to cover in this chapter. Please resist the temptation to skip over these sections requiring self-reflection and deep planning. I understand why you might want to—it feels weird, takes up time, seems too basic, etc. But I have known so many very motivated, very smart people fail to make long-term changes. They insisted on relying on willpower instead of creating a careful plan based on their individual lives, thought processes, and motivators. Healthful living and weight management are not about character. Mastering these areas requires having the right strategies, a positive attitude, solid skills, and a flexible plan.
Imagine Your Healthiest Self
A personal wellness vision is a concrete and motivating picture of you being healthy, feeling healthy, and living a healthful life. Imagine yourself at your ideal level of well-being. How do you feel? Look? Act? What are you doing that brings you joy and a sense of good health? It’s this vision that will help you set goals—both long term and short term—and stay focused on them. Without putting in the time to create this picture of your healthiest self, you risk setting weak goals with weak motivators based on a vague sense of wellness. A clear personal wellness vision and the goals that are born from it show you your path to better health and allow you to act with intention.
Here are two examples of a personal wellness vision. After reviewing the examples and the tips to creating a vision statement, grab some paper and a pencil or sit at your computer to get started on yours. It can be a work in progress. Because we make lots of changes, I always use pencil when creating vision statements with clients. Then I ask them to rewrite it in their own words and their own handwriting or to type it up neatly. This helps the client to think about, fine-tune, and edit the statement. If you’d like, use the Healthy Me template in Appendix B on page 266 to write out your wellness vision. Keep it in a handy place, so you can refer to it often.
Two Examples of Wellness Visions
Laurie’s Personal Wellness Vision
Brian’s Personal Wellness Vision
Tips for Creating a Personal Wellness Vision
Some people resist creating a personal wellness vision because it feels awkward or silly. And some people have a hard time putting their vision into words. Don’t let these things prevent you from turning your vague ideas of what you want into a clear picture of what you’re working toward. The following tips will help you create a compelling vision of your future healthy self.
• Write your statement in the present tense to make it more real and meaningful.
• Keep it positive, which is more powerful than a list of don’ts. Instead of writing about what you don’t want, write about what you do want. For example, turn “I’m not winded when I walk or uncomfortable when I cross my legs,” into “I walk with ease and am comfortable when I sit with my legs crossed.”
• Set aside some quiet time to ask yourself what’s important and why. These questions might help you.
• What does my ideal health and fitness look like in 1, 3, and 5 years?
• What activities am I happily participating in 1, 3, and 5 years from now?
• How do I look then? What am I wearing then?
• What about these things makes me happy and energized?
• What worries have I tossed aside?
• What are 5–10 benefits I’ll get by improving my lifestyle?
• What are at least three things that I highly value? How is my health linked to these values? For example, if you value spending time with your children or volunteering in your community, you’ll need good health to be physically active and to feel energized.
• What would my life be like if I achieved my ideal level of wellness? What would it be like if I stayed the same?
• Don’t hesitate to talk to a friend or family member about this to help you see the bigger picture. Often other people know just the questions to ask. In fact, consider inviting someone close to you to also create a personal wellness vision.
• Revisit your wellness vision often. Look to it for motivation and a reminder of what you are working so hard to achieve. And feel free to tweak or change it as you learn more about yourself and your goals.
Goal-Setting
Your personal wellness vision is a picture of where you’re going. Your long- and short-term behavioral goals are the blueprint to get there. I suggest that you create at least 3-month behavioral goals and weekly or other immediate goals. Three months (or even four, if you prefer) is a good amount of time to establish new routines, but not so far in the future that you can easily dismiss any sense of urgency or commitment.
3-Month Behavioral Goals
Ask yourself what habits or routines you’d like to have in place approximately 3 months from now. These behaviors should be the ones that direct you to fulfilling your personal wellness vision. To help Laurie reach her ideal level of health, she might have the following 3-month goals. Take notice of how they support her wellness vision described above. Write your own in your journal, or use the My 3-Month Behavioral Goals sheet on page 267 in Appendix B.
1. I exercise at the gym or otherwise participate in purposeful exercise at least four times each week and for a total of at least 200 minutes weekly.
2. Instead of visiting the office kitchen for a snack, I choose my afternoon snack from nourishing foods that I bring with me.
3. I pack my lunch every workday.
4. I cook dinner most nights from a selection of healthful recipes.
5. I have a regular bedtime.
Every 3 months, create a new set of 3-month behavioral goals.
Notice how your weekly goals step you toward your 3-month goals and eventually take you all the way to your ideal vision of your wellness.
Very-Short-Term Behavioral Goals
Setting 1- or 2-week goals is key to progress. These goals are small, manageable steps toward meeting your 3-month goals. Pick at least two small goals. As many as three to five is often ideal, although you should pick the number of goals that is best for you. Your goals should stretch you enough that you have to work at them and be important enough to keep you motivated and on target to your 3-month goals. But they should not be so hard that you set yourself up for failure. You do not have to address each of your 3-month goals every week. It’s reasonable to work on just a couple things each week or every 2 weeks. Write your very-short-term goals on the Goal-Tracker on page 269 in Appendix B.
Think of these goals as mini experiments. You are not stuck with them beyond a week or so. One purpose of these mini experiments is to learn what you like, what you don’t like, and what you are capable of doing. View these experiments with a scientist’s eye. Simply observe what happens and how you feel about it. Scientists are looking for data, not judging the data. When your 1- or 2-week experiment is over, use the information you gathered to help you get closer to your 3-month goals.
Laurie might create the following weekly goals to support her 3-month goals.
1. This week, I will renew my membership at the gym.
2. At least three mornings before work this week, I will walk around my neighborhood for 10–20 minutes or engage in other purposeful exercise for the same amount of time.
3. On Monday, I’ll take five pieces of fruit to work, one for each afternoon snack.
4. When I do my shopping on Saturday, I’ll buy a new lunchbox and a blue-ice pack to keep my food cold.
5. This week, I’ll collect at least five recipes to try and will prepare at least one of them. I’ll keep my new recipes in a binder with notes about what my family likes and dislikes.
You can see that these goals are all very specific behaviors. They are not vague like the statements “to eat better” or “to exercise more,” and they are not outcomes of behaviors, such as having lower blood glucose numbers or losing 2 pounds. Putting the emphasis on behaviors is really the only place you have control. You are fully in charge of your actions, but not really in charge of your body, which may sometimes seem to have a mind of its own.
Effective Goals Are SMART
• S: Specific (or Stranger Test): Be very clear about what you will do, how you will do it, and where you will do it. Give your goal the stranger test: If your goal is specific enough, even a stranger who reads it will know what you plan to do.
• M: Measurable: Can you measure your success? You should be able to recognize if you were 100% successful or 80% successful. “Eating better” and “snacking less” are not fully measurable. Rewrite your goal if it can’t be objectively measured.
• A: Action-Oriented: Make sure that your goal is written as a behavior. What action will you take? Remember that you have control over your actions, but your body can be a bit stubborn.
• R: Realistic: Ask yourself if your goal is attainable with reasonable effort. Can you achieve this with the resources you have? You should have to work at achieving your goal, but not struggle so much that you are doomed to fail.
• T: Timely: Know when you will do this and when you will assess the outcomes.
It is possible to be too specific or too time-bound. For example, you might say that you will walk on the beach after breakfast every day this week. That’s a terrific goal unless the weather turns bad or if you have an early-morning appointment. It’s a good idea to include a backup to a goal like this. In Laurie’s example above, she includes the option to do other exercise if she can’t or doesn’t walk outside before work.
The Goal Needs a Plan
There’s still more prepping to do once your goals are clearly written. You will need to look them over to see what stands in your way of success. Do you need new shoes before you walk? If you plan to eat fruit for snacks, when will you shop for them? One nice thing about setting 1- or 2-week goals is that you will quickly get very good at writing them and seeing how to make yourself successful. In Laurie’s example above, she immediately realized that to pack her lunch, she needed to buy supplies. She even created a goal around that. You will find a SMART Goals Worksheet in Appendix B on page 268.
Assess Your Readiness to Work on Your Goal
You have a carefully crafted SMART goal and a plan, but are you really ready to move forward? Are you confident that you can be reasonably successful? Are you motivated and willing to put in the time and effort? Do you believe that this goal will take you closer to your wellness vision? Success is more attainable if you believe that your goal is important. If you see no value in eating breakfast, for example, eating breakfast daily is probably not a good goal for you—at least not now. Be sure to choose goals that are important to you, not goals that someone else told you were important. Likewise, it’s good to be motivated to work on your goal and to be confident that you can be successful. Use the rulers below to answer each of the three questions.
1. On a scale of 1 to 10, how important is this goal to me?
2. On a scale of 1 to 10, how motivated am I to work on this goal?
3. One a scale of 1 to 10, how confident am I that with the resources I have available, I can be reasonably successful with this goal?
If you have identified at least a 7 on these rulers for each of the three questions, you have a good chance of being able to brag about your success. However, if you give your goal a low level of importance, say a 5 or less, you may want to hold this goal for now and work on something more relevant to you. If your motivation is high (7 or higher) but your confidence is low, ask yourself if the goal is too big or if you can do something or get some help to make success more likely.
Here’s an example. Consider a goal to pack your lunch for work all 5 days next week. You’ve ranked it a 10 for importance, 9 for motivation, but only 5 for confidence. Carefully think about this ranking. What made you score it a 5 and not much lower, like a 2? What gives you at least a moderate level of confidence? Then explore why your confidence isn’t higher and how you can boost it. Does changing your goal to pack your lunch four times next week boost your confidence? Does planning to grocery shop on the weekends lift it high enough? What about packing meals for 2 days at a time? Keep offering up new ideas to yourself until you can answer all three questions with a 7 or higher. Success brings about more success, so start wherever you are. Show yourself that you are successful.
Tracking Your Goals and Progress
Monitoring your progress is one more step to success. It’s a good idea to track both your behavioral goals and their outcomes. So if weight is important to you, step on the scale regularly. If your blood glucose concerns you, ask your health care provider to share your A1C or fasting blood glucose results every 6 months or so. Or ask if you should monitor your blood glucose at home.
Keep track of your behavior-change progress with a simple Goal-Tracker like this one. Use the template on page 269 in Appendix B or create one in your journal or on your computer. Another option is to use a smartphone app.
The final step in goal-setting is to assess your success. Ask yourself what you liked about working on each goal. What didn’t you like? Was something surprising? What do you want to keep, toss out, or modify? How can you make your success greater and the process more fun or rewarding? These are the types of questions that will help you develop your next set of 1- or 2-week goals.
Nine Steps in the Goal-Setting Process
This summary should help you get and stay organized with this process.
1. Set a SMART goal.
2. Plan how you will implement your goal. List all the steps it will take to be successful.
3. Use the Importance Ruler to be certain this goal is truly important to you (>7).
4. Use the Motivation Ruler to assess your motivation to carry out this goal (>7).
5. Use the Confidence Ruler to assess your confidence of success with this goal (>7).
6. Rewrite your goal if necessary based on any of the above.
7. Track your progress.
8. Assess your success.
9. Plan your next goal based on this experience.
The Mighty Habit
When we talk about a lifestyle reset, we are really talking about forming new, health-boosting habits and nixing bad ones. Habits can make our lives much easier. They free up the brain to work on complex problems or unique immediate needs. Or they simply give the brain some rest.
I remember first learning to drive. When starting the car, I concentrated very hard on where my feet were and the necessary steps to back out of the garage. Use the brake, not the gas. Check the mirrors. Turn the engine on. Don’t turn the ignition too far. Put the car in reverse. Check the mirrors. Lift foot off the brake. It was mentally taxing actually. Today, I sit in the car and go. I still do all of those same steps, but I hardly think of them because they are habitual. We can say the same thing about so many daily tasks. We don’t really concentrate on putting milk back in the refrigerator once we’re done with it. We don’t struggle with the steps to tying our shoes. In fact, you probably habitually put your shoes on with the right foot first or second, but nearly always in the same order. And you probably tie them with the right or left tie crossed first, but again, always in the same order. How you put your shoes on and tie them is a pretty neutral habit, but being able to do it automatically frees you to think of other things while getting dressed, like remembering to grab your lunch before racing out the door, until that too becomes a habit.
Forming New Habits
You’ve probably heard that it takes 21 days to form a habit. Sadly, this is just a myth. Research points out that the length of time it takes to form a new habit varies significantly. In one study, it took participants between 18 and 254 days to establish a new health-related habit. The length of time depended on individual characteristics, things in the environment, and how hard the task was.
Whether you want to eat mindfully, reach for fruit for a snack, or take a walk after lunch, what may seem impossible to change, isn’t impossible. Is it hard? Yes, probably. Very hard? That too. But what now takes lots of brainpower may soon use little mental energy and become so routine that you hardly recognize when you’re engaged in the new behavior.
To purposefully form new habits, it helps to understand the habit loop, as described by Charles Duhigg in his fun-to-read bestseller, The Power of Habit. The habit loop consists of three components. First you have a cue, which is something to trigger the brain to act automatically. The second component is the routine, which could be a behavior or a thought. The final component is the reward, which is the immediate benefit that comes from the routine.
Create your own habit loop
You might find that you are compelled to check your email every time you see or hear that a new message has come in. Your cue is the sight or sound of a new message. Leaving another task to read the new email is the routine. Perhaps your reward is having a clean email box. There are many examples like this in your daily life. Do you check social media (routine) whenever you stand in line at the supermarket (cue)? Do you make a pit stop to eat sweets in the office lunchroom (routine) when you walk by (cue)? Do you routinely take a walk (routine) after you clear the dinner dishes (cue)?
Use knowledge of this habit loop to form new habits. Perhaps the easiest place to start is to pick your cue. Start with a current habit and link another to it. One of my clients is currently working on forming the habit of exercising before work. We talked about her current morning routine and decided that she would lace up her shoes and head outside for a walk or into the living room to dance to music as soon as she put her morning coffee cup into the dishwasher, a habit already ingrained. She is attempting to link a morning walk or dance (routine) to her current behavior of putting her coffee cup away (cue).
I have successfully linked a new behavior (routine) to an existing behavior (cue) dozens of times. An example unrelated to health has to do with watering the plants on my front porch. For years, my hanging baskets and potted plants would die from neglect, until I linked watering them to a regular habit. My family has our milk delivered, so I rinse the empty bottles and leave them for our milkman. Frustrated with myself for letting our plants die, I brainstormed some ideas for a cue. This was a simple solution because I have to put the bottles outside anyway. Now I rinse them, fill them with fresh water, and give my plants a drink before putting the empty bottles in the crate for our milkman. I’m happy to report that none of my plants has withered from neglect since I started this behavior.
Don’t forget to build in your reward. Sometimes the reward of exercise is the release of feel-good brain chemicals that comes during a hard workout. But sometimes the exercise was a drag, and we have to force ourselves to keep going. That’s where we need to insert an obvious reward. I encourage my clients to give themselves the pat on the back they deserve. Take several seconds after you accomplish a task to fully appreciate your effort. I don’t mean a 1-second, “Yay, I did it.” Fully embrace the feelings of accomplishment and the effort you gave it. Feel the pride for 10 or 20 or 30 seconds. Without reward, change is hard.
Nixing Bad Habits
Perhaps you want to break the habit of automatically eating second and third helpings at dinner and grabbing a snack every time you walk by the kitchen at your home or office. Starting with the cue is often the easiest place to break an unproductive habit, too. Examine what leads you to unhealthful behaviors. What is the cue? If the cue is seeing treats in the kitchen, can you avoid the kitchen? Can you arrange that office sweets are put on a counter not seen from the doorway? One client successfully avoided the office kitchen simply by packing a thermal bottle with coffee every morning. She could still enjoy her coffee without going near tempting treats. Another client stopped nibbling on cookies at home once she decided to store them in a cabinet she rarely opened. And a few clients over the years have broken their habits of eating a donut or two on their morning commutes simply by driving a couple of blocks out of the way to avoid the donut shop flashing a “Hot Now” sign.
You might also break a bad habit by replacing it with a new one. I know lots of people, including myself, who nixed nighttime snacking by brushing their teeth immediately after dinner. We simply used the cue of getting up from the table or carrying dirty dishes to the sink as a reminder to brush our teeth. With clean teeth and a fresh mouth, it’s easier to avoid recreational eating.
Look at your cue, but also look at your reward. What is the reward from sitting with a bowl of ice cream late at night? If the reward is time to yourself or something indulgent, you don’t need a bowl of ice cream. You can indulge in other ways: a good book, sipping exotic tea from a fancy mug, or even by giving yourself a foot massage. The key is to do this new behavior regularly, so it becomes the replacement habit.
Guard Healthy Habits
New habits are tenuous. They can be easily broken. Even longstanding habits are fragile under certain circumstances such as moving to a new home, starting a new job, getting injured or sick, and getting married. Guard your habits fiercely. If a change in your daily schedule keeps you from attending exercise class after breakfast, spend a few minutes walking or stretching to maintain the routine of exercise after breakfast. Once you’re back to your usual schedule, you’ll still have the habit of morning exercise. If you have formed the habit of preparing a salad and another vegetable for supper, don’t let the change of seasons ruin your healthy plate. Think through what it will take to keep your vegetable habit. Will it be making soup in the winter? Using more canned or frozen and fewer fresh vegetables? There are many possible solutions. For tips to create a structured plan, look at the HURDLE Method to Overcoming Obstacles later in this chapter.
Nine Steps to Forming a Good Habit
Using the concept of the habit loop described above, you can create purposeful new habits. These nine steps offer additional guidance and a structure you can return to often.
1. Start small. The key is to become consistent, so make it as easy as possible to achieve success right away. If, for example, your ultimate goal is to walk for 30 minutes every morning before work, get into the routine quickly by walking just 5 or 10 minutes every day. You’re more likely to form a habit in this short daily walk than you are in a longer walk just once or twice a week. Keep in mind that success breeds more success, so starting small can lead to something big.
2. Link your new habit to an existing one. As discussed in greater detail above, tying the new behavior to something you’re already doing is a smart way to become consistent with the desired behavior. If you want to keep a water bottle full, plan to refill it each time you get up to answer the phone. If you want to start packing your lunch, link that to cleaning up your kitchen after dinner. Think about things you do each day and things that happen each day. Some examples: Shower, brush your teeth, use the restroom, drink coffee, check the mail, check email, let the dogs out, let the dogs in, the phone rings, eat a meal, read the paper.
3. Choose a manageable number of new habits to work on. This will vary from person to person, but most won’t work on more than four or five new habits at a time. To maximize success, it’s better to aim to change fewer things. So many people are hypermotivated to achieve a rapid overhaul that they quickly become overwhelmed and lose any progress they make early on.
4. Think convenience. Plan to exercise or pack your lunch at times that actually fit your schedule. Beyond that, be sure that you have the necessary supplies. You’ll need comfortable shoes and socks for walking and something to carry your lunch in and keep it cold. Have these things handy. It’s much harder to form a new habit if you can’t find the things you need.
5. Reward yourself. Identify an immediate reward and focus on it. Your reward may be a sense of pride, feeling more satisfied or comfortable after a meal, having a runner’s high, great taste, less afternoon fatigue, or saving a few bucks by avoiding takeout. It doesn’t matter what it is, as long as it’s important to you and you spend some time acknowledging it.
6. Create an if-then statement. This is how you safeguard your desired behavior when life gets in the way. If your goal is to walk outside before work, your if-then statement might look like this: If it’s raining, I’ll ride my stationary bike instead of walking outside. If you’re working to prepare dinner most nights, you might have an if-then statement like this: If I get home late from after-school activities, I’ll prepare a quick dinner from frozen items or pantry staples like canned tuna, whole-grain crackers, and fruit.
7. Track it. Create a SMART goal around your new desired behavior, and use the Goal-Tracker first described on page 28 or some other method of monitoring your behavior. One of my clients has a bulletin board–sized calendar to which she adds different color stickers for various behaviors. I’ve even heard of the paper clip method. With this method, a person starts the day with a certain number of paper clips and moves one to a dish or a pocket each time the behavior is performed. For example, you might start your day with a string of 10 paper clips, one for each glass of unsweetened drink you want to consume. After drinking one glass of water or unsweetened tea, move one paper clip from your string of paper clips to a dish, your pocket, or a paper clip holder. Some people prefer apps on their smartphones. Whatever you choose to use, use it consistently (yes, that’s a habit, too). The act of tracking and the visual cues tracking provides reinforce your desired behavior.
8. Assess it. Set aside some thinking time to review your progress. Remember to view your progress without judgment. Allow the data to inform you and to help you tweak your goals or your plans.
9. Join forces. It helps to have a partner. Work with a friend, family member, or a professional such as a registered dietitian nutritionist (RD or RDN) or a credentialed health coach.
Nine Tips to Nixing a Bad Habit
It’s hard to break into the mind when it’s operating on autopilot. Thus, extinguishing a bad habit usually takes considerable effort. Sometimes it’s much harder to stop a bad habit than to create a good one. Willpower is not the answer. Willpower is magical thinking. After identifying an unhelpful habit to stamp out, try these nine tips.
1. Identify the benefit. Even bad habits offer some benefit. Maybe spending time on social media gives you a needed break from household chores, paying bills, or working. Dinner from the drive-thru saves you time. Snacking on your commute home lessens the boredom. Try to identify each possible benefit of the bad habit. There may be many.
2. Pick another way to achieve the same benefit. Certainly, you can take a more productive break from work or chores such as writing in a journal or even socializing with a friend for a few minutes. There are other ways to save time in your day than to skip a wholesome meal. And listening to a podcast or recorded book makes an afternoon commute zip by. The point is to brainstorm ways to maintain a reward.
3. Identify your cues. What things in your environment or what thoughts trigger the undesired behavior? For some people, seeing a “Hot Now” sign triggers a craving for donuts. Seeing chocolate in the pantry might spark a taste for it. Feeling lonely or worried might summon up the desire for a favorite comfort food. Putting the kids to bed may signal it’s time for dessert.
4. Remove cues. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve had a handful of donut lovers avoid the urge simply by driving a route that didn’t pass a donut shop. Other people have removed trigger foods from sight. And I keep chocolate in a cabinet I rarely open for any reason other than to treat myself.
5. Feel the urge. Some triggers can’t be removed, but we can relearn how to respond to them. Mindfulness experts teach us to explore and fully experience the urge to engage in the unwanted behavior. Some call it surfing the urge. You can minimize the power a craving or urge has over you by observing it without judgment. You will likely see that cravings don’t simply get stronger, even though they sometimes feel like they will never end. Rather, they build, peak, and drop off similar to an ocean’s wave. Try it. When an urge comes over you, sit quietly and watch it without battling it. Where do you feel it in your body? What do you feel? Focus on your breath. Don’t argue with the urge, and don’t try to beat it. Just observe it. Most likely, the urge will crash and wash away in only a few minutes. Like other new behaviors, this takes practice to perfect.
6. Substitute a new routine. One of my patients nixed nighttime snacking by picking up needlework. Another person gargles with a strong mouthwash after dinner. If you’ve accurately identified your cues or triggers, you might find success with a replacement behavior.
7. Visualize success. Learn to ignore your triggers by imagining yourself being successful. If you want to stop unhealthful snacking in the car, imagine getting into the driver’s seat, take note that there are no snacks nearby, take satisfaction in that, and visualize yourself driving your usual route being perfectly comfortable without eating. Finally, praise your success. This step also is a strategy that takes practice, so don’t get discouraged if it feels awkward at first or if you need many visualization sessions before a craving loses its power over you. Some people visualize the desired behavior daily until they are secure in their new routine.
8. Assess it. Again, set aside some time to focus on your progress. Remember to view your experience with a scientist’s eye. You’re collecting data to help you appropriately change your plan.
9. Join forces. If you need more help, seek out a friend, family member, or professional.
HURDLE Method to Overcoming Obstacles
Part of forming new habits and successfully ticking behaviors on your goal sheet is anticipating obstacles and planning to overcome them. For example, how will you manage your alcohol intake at an upcoming wedding or fit in your daily exercise when you have houseguests. Eventually, looking for impediments to your success will also become second nature. For now, use this HURDLE method. The worksheet on page 270 in Appendix B will guide you through each step.
Defining HURDLE
• H: How is your upcoming schedule different? Think about your day and look at your calendar for appointments and activities. Is there something unusual or at an unusual time?
• U: Understand how these events, appointments, or obligations could derail you from your healthy lifestyle goals. Will something prevent you from eating a meal, getting to exercise class on time, or getting to bed at the usual hour? Will someone else be in charge of your meals or your schedule?
• R: Record your options. Brainstorm and write down every possible solution, even the silly ones.
• D: Decide on a solution. Pick one or more realistic options from your list of possible solutions.
• L: List the steps. Record everything that you must do to make this solution work. Include if you need to buy things, wake up early, change your schedule, ask for help, etc.
• E: Exercise your choice and Evaluate it. Carry out your selected option. Make notes about how it went, what you learned, and what you will do differently next time.
Here’s an example of how to use the HURDLE method:
• H: How: Beth’s parents will be visiting for a week.
• U: Understand: Over the last 8 months, Beth has changed her cooking and food choices to provide more wholesome food for her family. Beth and her family attempt to follow a Mediterranean-style eating pattern, rich in plant proteins, fish, whole grains, fruits, and vegetables. Beth grew up eating Southern fried chicken, biscuits, sweet tea, and other foods she now finds greasy and unhealthful. Her parents continue to eat like this, and Beth is expected to prepare meals and shop for groceries while her parents are in town. Beth worries that she’ll lose health gains if she prepares the food her parents expect.
• R: Record: Beth jots down these options.
• Ask her parents not to come.
• Prepare two sets of meals.
• Prepare the foods she usually prepares.
• Prepare the foods she usually prepares with some modification.
• Prepare Southern-style food in more healthful ways.
• Ask her parents to prepare their own food if they don’t like what she’s cooking.
• Eat out most nights, so everyone can order what they like.
• D: Decide: Beth decides to stick with her family’s usual diet and make a few changes to please her parents.
• L: List: Beth lists these steps to her action plan.
• Call her mom to inform her parents about the family’s current diet.
• Send her mom a list of foods Beth likes to cook now and ask her mom which foods are most likely to be accepted.
• Plan her menus for the week to include mostly the foods her parents have given a favorable nod to. Add a few family favorites from her childhood that Beth can modify to make more wholesome.
• Make a shopping list based on her planned menus. Add ready-to-bake biscuits and a few other foods that her parents love. Beth can add them to her otherwise Mediterranean-style meals.
• Purchase the food.
• Each night, prepare a wholesome meal. Two or three times out of the week, add a favorite of her parents, such as biscuits or a trimmed-down version of macaroni and cheese.
• E: Exercise and Evaluate: Beth executed her plan as expected, and she is so pleased with the outcome. Her parents accepted the food happily, even though they have little interest in adopting this way of eating. Beth spent time cooking with her mom, which they both enjoyed. When her parents visit next time, Beth and her mom are going to pick out and try new recipes together.
In Chapters 11 and 12, we go into more depth about attitudes and behavior change. Read or page through these chapters whenever you feel you need more help in these areas.
Be Empowered
• Pick up a journal or open a computer document to track your lifestyle reset.
• Set aside time to work on your personal wellness vision.
• Create 3-month behavioral goals that will lead you toward your healthiest self.
• Create 1- or 2-week behavioral goals that will lead to success with your 3-month goals.
• Track your progress with the Goal-Tracker on page 269 in Appendix B, electronically or any way that is convenient for you.
• Share your goals and your progress on social media. Use #LifestyleReset and @NutritionJill.