Forming New Habits for Your Health Goals

The start of a new year signifies new beginnings and it is a chance to re-evaluate yourself, your goals and start afresh. But why wait for January to set new year’s resolutions when a healthier and happier you is possible anytime? New Year’s resolutions have a bad reputation and for a good reason: only 10% of people who set resolutions actually follow through with them and manage to make lasting changes in their lives.

By making realistic, yet life-changing promises to yourself, it’s possible to completely change your approach to living and to really start living. So, stop simply surviving and start thriving with WillPowders. 

Promise yourself that this time, it’s going to be different. Make that vow and commit to yourself. Let’s firstly shift our mindset and begin with a bit of self love and care. Being kind to yourself and allowing yourself to forgive the little slips is so important, if not vital to being able to pick yourself back up when you fall. By embedding a few healthy habits one at a time, you’re more likely to succeed and develop stamina and resilience. Here are some tips on how you can set realistic health goals for yourself, not just in the new year.

Let’s start off by reframing resolutions as intentions. Resolutions can conjure feelings of good or bad and success or failure; whereas, intentions offer us a place of compassion and growth. We invite you to focus on things that make you feel happy, healthy, loved and fulfilled. If it doesn’t serve you, let it go.

It’s hard to stop a habit, cold turkey, so don’t change everything at once. Start with one habit at a time, chip away, so to speak. It’s important to avoid the overwhelm with a complete overhaul. If your goal is lose weight, don’t completely overhaul your diet and try and pack in a workout everyday; instead, make tweaks to your diet, ditch the sugar first and replace it will healthy fats that are going to stave off the crave, working up to embedding a short exercise regime when you have got control of your cravings. This could take weeks or months, the point is, it doesn’t matter - there’s time to be had.

Our brains are wired to look for ways to save time and energy, which is why we are such habitual creatures. Forming new habits can be time consuming and require just that little bit more energy, which is not easy to find when we are so depleted of it. Habits become so automatic that your brain isn’t even part of the decision-making process anymore. This is why it’s essential we recognise our habits and make an effort to change the ones that aren’t serving us. By doing this, you will consciously ditch the stuff that is hurting you and be able to replace them with the stuff that contributes to a healthy lifestyle.

Stop seeing your body as the enemy; instead, look for ways to understand it and nourish it with what it actually needs. Eating so that you can feel better should be your main priority and secondary to losing weight. If you look after your brain, nourishing it with the good stuff, the body will follow. 

Instead of jumping headfirst into a new diet, start paying attention to your body. Noting down how certain foods make you feel immediately, an hour after and even the morning after, is a great way of detecting what agrees and disagrees with you.  Everyone is different, beautifully unique, so a food/mood diary is a great way to tap into a bit you. Our bodies are giving us feedback all the time and once you start to understand how certain foods make you feel, it becomes easier to make different and healthier choices.

Perfection is a myth and by aiming for it you’re only setting yourself up to fail. We have to accept that our diet, physical strength, resilience and mood will fluctuate; we cannot be perfect all the time, but we can certainly harness when we feel our best and ensure that we are making the right decisions for our bodies as much as possible.

There’s nothing worse than thinking you should be doing something and not doing it. Exercise may feel like the last thing you want to do, after all, our bodies and brains have evolved over millions of years for self-preservation and to conserve energy at all costs. However, once you get going and the endorphins kick in, you’ll feel an amazing natural high, which will make it all worth it. Treat yourself to some new lycra or yoga pants - a new outfit can sometimes be the motivation we need to feel like our best selves and motivate us to get going. You also need to figure out what is going to get your dopamine flowing; is it music, a podcast or a high energy fitness instructor? Keep it fresh though, mix it up and keep your body guessing.

Give yourself a break from the constant stimulation of computers, phones and the news cycle. Stepping away from your phone, conducting a social media detox or turning off bad news could be the very thing that is going to support a rebalance, a mood boost, or simply give you time to audit your bad habits and integrate new ones. 

Making time for yourself and finding ways to relax will result in less anxiety, fewer cravings and a happier mental state, making it easier for you to make the right decisions for yourself and sustaining them in the fut