When we embark on our fitness or wellness journey, most of us desire sustainability, but have a hard time taking the necessary actions.
The sustainability grit is hinged in both external and internal factors including social influence, habits, individual self, feelings and cognition, and tangibility. Socially, learning about the behaviors of others can be motivating. For instance, if a co-worker or family member has successfully lost and maintained weight over time, this could influence you to get started on your own weight loss journey and later on motivate you to remain accountable and sustain it.
For habits, building new sustainable habits requires first breaking and letting go of the undesirable ones. Behavioral change is significantly relevant for healthy lifestyle adoption. Research shows that more than fifty percent (50%) of illnesses are caused by human behavior. In case you find yourself struggling with change, don’t worry, you are not alone! Being an iterative and dynamic process, desirable lifestyle behavioral change necessitates desire, capability, motivation and opportunity. Whereas desire, motivation and capability are internal conditions, opportunity is an external condition. These are all interlinked and can influence each other. Other external interventions can be used to influence and change one’s lifestyle behavior including education, incentivization, training, enablement, environmental restructuring, persuasion, coercion and restriction. Some of these could work to improve one’s capability, while others may focus on increasing motivation, and others are suitable for modifying external opportunities.
Even after successfully making the necessary lifestyle changes, it’s usually hard to maintain them. Sustaining lifestyle behavioral change requires self-control, grit, and sometimes a deep examination of oneself, feelings and cognition. With a long-term goal in mind, self-control is imperative on a daily basis, including making relevant choices and actions that draw you towards the goal. This entails foregoing short-term rewards that won’t necessarily take you in the right direction. It calls for goal prioritization to make your daily decision making easier.
Grit takes tenacious pursuit of long-term goals even in the face of setbacks over a long period of time. It requires preparation with a ready strategy in mind. For instance, if you’re on a weight loss journey, to avoid eating haphazardly, or on impulse, you could intentionally have all your meals in a day or week planned out and prepared before. Need help with planning a long-term, feasible and results-oriented personalized meal plan that works just for you and to your palate? You can request one here. Besides aiding with weight loss, following a healthy diet enables your body to function optimally in areas including disease prevention, energy production, immunity, physical and mental performance.
At P3.8, we believe that significant improvements in fitness and wellness are as a result of small steps and decisions. Real change takes time, so we don’t believe in selling quick fixes. That’s why we take time to create customized workout programmes and personalized meal plans for each individual, to suit their unique and special needs, breaking down their goals into small steps, including tactic on building and adoption of lifelong habits towards sustainable change. Our highly trained team of coaches inspires and motivates you to reach your goals. Your progress is monitored on an ongoing basis to ensure measurable results.
Can you tell patterns in lifestyle behavioral change in Timothy’s testimony?
“No one is perfect, but each one of us can be a little better, one step at a time, one day at a time”