How To Succeed In Health And Fitness

By Ralph Goldsmith

If you want to lose weight, be fitter, eat more healthily, take more exercise, live longer, be able to do more, then you need to know how to create a plan you will be able to stick to.

OK, does any of this sound familiar?

You decide to get fitter.

You say your going to go to the gym 3 times a week.

You’re definitely going to cycle to work 2 days a week

You absolutely will play tennis every weekend

Or something similar?

Fast forward 3 months and what’s happening?

The bikes tyres are going flat under a layer of dust in the garage, the tennis rackets lost somewhere in the attic and the only thing your losing to the gym is the monthly fees coming out of your bank account.

So why is it so hard to stick to an exercise routine or a diet?

Here’s two secrets about human behavior for you.

1. Humans are goal seeking organisms. We are motivated by achieving results.

2. Humans are motivated by emotion.

So it’s important to know why you want to exercise, what you want to get out of it, and how that will make you feel.

So start off by deciding why you’re starting an exercise program rather than what you are going to do. Look at the next six months, what results do you want in that time?

If you want to lose weight, exactly how much?

If you want to reduce your waist size, what will your new waist size be?

If your targets are around getting your heart rate lower, either when you are at rest or during exercise, or maybe you want to get your blood pressure back into the healthy zone, whatever it is be really specific and detailed about what you want it to be.

Once you’ve got that, think about how you will feel when you have achieved it.

Will you feel happy? Proud? Relieved? Ecstatic? Delighted?

Now you have the result you want to get, and the emotional motivation to go get it.

The third big secret I want to let you in on, about human behavior is that you are many times more likely to achieve what you want if you actually make a commitment to it.

So how do you commit?

First, write it down. Write out what you are going to achieve, specifically, then write down how that will make you feel.

Writing things down is a form of committment.

Second, tell other people. If you tell 10 people that you are going to lose a specific amount of weight in 6 months that’s 10 people that will be watching to see you succeed or fail.

You will have made a commitment and will me much more likely to stick with your program if you do this.

Finally, consider setting some smaller goals for yourself.

If you’ve decided what you want to have achieved in 6 months, you may be feeling a bit overwhelmed by the scale of it.

So break it down.

Set yourself a goal for the first month, another for the second month and so on.

So, if you wanted to lose 12 lbs in 6 months. Set a target of 2 lbs in the first month, 2 in the second and so on. Losing 2 lbs is a lot easier than losing 12 right?

Don’t forget that exercise is only one side of the equation

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