3 Tips to Live Really Well… until the End

Everyone knows that a major factor in living well depends on maintaining a healthy physique and staying active. While the diet industry appears to be helping in this manner, diet businesses are missing three important reasons that lead to failure.

This has nothing to do with calories or carbs or ketones.

To be really successful in adhering to healthy habits, get on board with these three tips. Without these, you risk staying on the diet/gain/diet/gain more rollercoaster. This has happened to all of us, and it can feel impossible to get out of that loop. Before you search again, read on.

1.  Feel the Threat. If you don’t feel scared enough, you are going to choose instant gratification over habit change. This is why short-term goals, like losing weight for an event work temporarily. Those goals work temporarily because the fear of failure on that day is greater than the instant gratification. The problem with finite goals is after the goal date passes, the fear and motivation disappear. Now the instant gratification is more appealing because the original goal is gone.

Long-term success comes from more permanent threats, like being unable to fully participate in life, like being so unconditioned that you can’t enjoy an active vacation. Millenials may find this hard to believe, but ask any baby boomer or Generation-X person, and they get it. The less active you are, the less active you become and it leads to a downward spiral. The point is that quality of life is a big issue.  Do you want to really live or merely exist on the sidelines out of breath and in loose baggy clothes?

It is a true threat, to lose the ability to keep active. Just think about some of your older heavier immobile unhealthy relatives or friends. They’re miserable. They have ‘parked’ and given in. 

Now think about people who lived active lives until they died. My uncle Sam was still doing bicep curls and abdominal exercises at age 90. His quality of life was outstanding. Sadly my own father decided to wait out his life in a chair and eat for instant gratification, and in doing so he gave away his freedom. it was painful to watch him dwindle away as a prisoner in his own body.

For some people, it is a threat to have their children see them as a diet-obsessed person who never has any success or happiness. Teach your children by example that healthy behaviors are the best way to live and that than yo-yo dieting and food obsession, are not desirable.

2. Outsmart your emotional immaturity. Don’t be offended, we are all emotionally immature. This is why we want everything we see, like pizza and chocolate (and Amazon shopping sprees) If we leave decisions up to our brain, we would eat anything, because our brain looooves a quick glucose hit. We cannot trust our brain to be good at willpower discipline or self-control. We might get by temporarily, but if we rely on willpower and self-control alone, we are going to continue to fail and start over again and again. 

A much more reliable approach is to make our environment convenient for our brain to practice healthy habits

  • Make your environment conducive to your healthy choices: Set up your environment to favor the choices that enhance your desired behaviors. For example, keep fresh easy to prepare food on hand. Place menus on your desk at work for restaurants that offer order fresh salads with protein.
  • Remove all temptation: Get those negative triggers out of your environment. Stop buying junk food. Period. (your kids will benefit too) Toss out the pizza delivery menus at work and home. My husband likes to have chocolate in the house at all times, so I ask him to stash it in his office where I can’t see it. 

3. A governing power. What keeps you accountable? Everyone needs an accountability strategy. For example, enlist a friend to swap accountability with. Commit to calling each other daily with your progress. I had a friend many years ago that called me every morning to tell me about her food choices the day before, I was her accountability governor, although I didn’t know it at the time LOL. 

Join a group where you are required check in each week. Put some skin in the game! Having to pay for guidance and accountability, make it successful, because nobody wants to throw away money. Another important governing power is spirituality. Look to a higher power for guidance. Whatever your faith is, use it. 

The trifecta of successful change is to feel the threat, outsmart your emotional immaturity, and look to a governing power. 

Hey, are you looking to keep your weekends comfortable and still in alignment with your healthy lifestyle? For guidance on designing your own sustainable healthy nutrition approach, schedule a sustainable nutrition call so that you can avoid feeling guilty or shameful every Monday.  

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