Steps 5-7

Each week I will elaborate on one of seven steps that I have taken to begin transforming myself into the healthy and fit person that I want to be.  Click here to view the 7 steps (Havi’s 7).

Even though I started out with the intention of posting a new step each week, I feel that the remaining steps are straight forward and that there’s no need to drag them out across multiple weeks.

5.  Share your journey.

There are a few reasons why I believe this is important to achieving your health and fitness goals.  The first is that I believe this will make you more accountable.  If others know about your goals and your plans to reach them, you will be more likely to stick to them.  If I tell my brother that I’m sticking to 3-500 calories per meal, what do you think I might order if we go out to Portillo’s for lunch?  I can guarantee you that I’m not going to order the beef sandwich with some cheese fries.  No, I’m going to order a salad.  Or let’s say I’m really craving those cheese fries, hopefully he would help discourage me from doing so.  You’ve got friends and family around you that want to see you healthy and happy, let them be there for you.

The other reason for this is that as you start to show signs of progress toward your goals people are going to take notice.  They’re going to know that you’re working on your health and will most likely compliment you along the way.  There really is no greater feeling in the world than an unprompted compliment.  Those compliments will really go a long way to helping you stay motivated on your journey.

6.  Help others with their goals.

This is another way to keep you motivated and there really isn’t too much to it.  The idea behind it is that as you’re encouraging others to reach their goals, you’ll also be putting pressure on yourself to reach your goals.  As I said in the initial post, if you’re telling your friend to get off the couch and push play on that P90X DVD you can’t really sit there and watch a reality show.  You’re going to have to get up and get your workout done too.  Furthermore, you’re going to be building up a support group along the way that’s going to help you when you need it.  As Zig Ziglar says that, “You can have everything you want in life if you just help enough people get what they want.”

7.  Have fun!!!

If you’re not having fun, if you’re not enjoying yourself it’s going to be hard to stick to your program.  Whatever fitness program your doing should be enjoyable, and if it’s not switch it up or at least try and find some friends you can do it with.  Another alternative would be to find a fitness coach that’s energetic that you like.  Find something that you like and stick with it!  This applies to eating healthy too.  Find recipes that are healthy, but also taste good or are fun to prepare.  If you like to grill, find recipes that fit your diet that use a grill.  If you like to bake, find good recipes that involve baking.

4. Take it one day at a time.

Each week I will elaborate on one of seven steps that I have taken to begin transforming myself into the healthy and fit person that I want to be.  Click here to view the 7 steps (Havi’s 7).

4.  Take it one day at a time.

Yes, it’s cliché and there isn’t much to this step; however, it will be important to your success.  As I help others on message boards and through various types of social media I constantly see people upset about what they had to eat over the weekend, during a holiday, at a work luncheon, etc. and these people will seem stressed at the thought of the “damage” they’ve done or how much work it will take to undo the past.  This is stress you don’t need and can be much more detrimental to your success than that piece of birthday cake you ate.

What we need to do instead is to simply focus on what we can do today that will make it a successful day.  Do I need to do 45 minutes of Insanity Pure Cardio?  Okay, then I’m going to make sure I push play.  Do I need to spread my caloric intake across 5 meals at 300-500 calories per meal?  Okay, then I’m going to plan out what I’m going to have for the day and when I’ll eat my meals.  Then I’m going to execute the plan.  The idea behind this is to keep stringing together successful days and if you can consistently have more successful days than unsuccessful days you will see progress toward your health and fitness goals.

I realize that this week’s blog is a bit on the short side, but this is a simple step and there’s no need to overcomplicate things.  You’ve set your goals, you’ve learned about yourself and how you’re body works, and you’re monitoring your progress; just do what you need to do each day and take it one day at a time.

Step 3: Monitor your progress

Each week I will elaborate on one of seven steps that I have taken to begin transforming myself into the healthy and fit person that I want to be.  Click here to view the 7 steps (Havi’s 7).

Step 3: Monitor you progress

This week we’ll discuss why it’s important that you monitor your progress.  As I mentioned in the initial post about the 7 steps, it’s important to monitor your progress so that you’ll either get positive reinforcement when doing well or you’ll have a better idea on what to change if you’re not doing well.  When I write that you need to monitor your progress I mean to take it much further than just recording your weight and measurements.  That’s definitely important and you should already be doing that regularly, but I want you to monitor your food intake and exercise as well.

There are many reasons for monitoring your food intake and exercise.  For starters, studies have shown that every time you mark a task as completed on a to-do list your body will release a small amount of endorphins.  This gives you a nice positive reinforcement and if done regularly can almost lead to a slight addiction.  Yes, you read that right, you can become addicted to being productive.  This is one of the reasons it’s beneficial to monitor your food and exercise.  If you set a daily caloric goal for example, after monitoring your day’s progress you can check off that you accomplished your goal for the day and get that positive reinforcement.  Similarly, if you set a goal of exercising 6 days a week for 40 minutes a day, you can record when you workout and again get that positive reinforcement.  Doing these things will lead to the release of those endorphins and you could actually become addicted to eating right and working out!  You’ll find that over time you’ll procrastinate less and cheat less, which in turn will lead to you reaching your overall health and fitness goals.

The other side of the coin is that if you find you’re not moving towards your overall at the rate you like, you can more easily intervene.  There are some great online communities out there filled with people that genuinely want to help others get healthy.  Some are experts, some aren’t, but by reaching out in these communities you can get a lot of advice rather quickly.  Obviously, the best route would be to talk with a professional but either way you go it’ll make it much easier to help you if others can know specifically what you’re doing.

So the following are two tools I use to monitor my progress:

1.  TeamBeachbody.com

This is a great site with a great community that I use daily to help track my fitness goals.  My favorite part about this site is something called the WOWY Supergym.  There you can schedule and complete workouts.  Additionally, they have a cool down chat room that you can hang out in when you’re done working out.  However the best part is that each day when you complete a workout in their gym you have the opportunity to enter a daily contest of up to $1000.  It’s definitely worth checking out and you can sign up for free here and you can check out my profile here.

2. My Fitness Pal

This is a great site that also has a great community that I use regularly to help track my food intake.  They have a pretty large database of foods so that all you have to do is search for the foods you ate (or scan if you have the free phone up) and it will pull up all the nutritional information for you to easily keep track of what you’re putting in your body.  This site also has a Facebook-like set up in that you can find other people with similar interests and goals, friend them, and see status updates on how they’re doing.  This site is also free to use and you can check it out their site here and my profile here.

Step 2: Educate yourself on yourself

Each week I will elaborate on one of seven steps that I have taken to begin transforming myself into the healthy and fit person that I want to be.  Click here to view the 7 steps (Havi’s 7).

Step 2:  Educate yourself on yourself

The problem many of us face when making the decision to get healthy is that we don't know what to do.  We know we need to exercise and eat better, but what exactly does that mean.  Television, print media, and the internet are flooded with all sorts of diet and fitness plans but it's hard to determine which ones actually work and more importantly which ones will work best for you.  The following is a list of resources to help get you started in determining what's going to work best for you.  If you're reading this and you know of a great resource that has helped you out, feel free to post it in the comments (just remember that we're educating, not selling and I will delete comments I feel cross that line).

Before we get to the list, know that your best resource isn't listed below.  The best thing you can do when starting out is to seek the advice of your physician.  Using your history and current health, they'll be able give you specific advice where as most everything else you'll find is more general.

Mayo Clinic

http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/HealthyLivingIndex/HealthyLivingIndex

This is an awesome website to learn nearly anything and everything you want to know about getting and living healthy.  Seriously, the amount of information on this site is astounding.  Whenever I’m curious about anything related to my health I know I can find it here.  Just take a minute, click the link, and play around; you’ll see what I mean.

Web MD BMI Plus Calculator

http://www.webmd.com/diet/calc-bmi-plus#moreWTH

This is a great tool and I mentioned it in my last post.  It’ll have you input some information about yourself and will compute your BMI as well as show you what a healthy weight and BMI would be for a person of your age, height, and gender.  It will also educate you on what BMI is and other attributes such as target heart rate.

NY Times article on Interval Training

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/03/fashion/03Fitness.html?pagewanted=1

If you haven’t heard of interval training it’s one of the more efficient ways to burn calories when working out.  This is a pretty good article that will explain it for you.  The idea behind posting this link is that you should search out ways to best maximize the time you have to exercise.  For me, this means participating in interval training via Insanity.  That doesn’t necessarily mean that it will work for you, but the point I’m trying to make is you should spend a little time researching different workout programs using quality sources.

Twitter

Many people have the impression that Twitter is just full of egotistical people posting everything they do throughout the day so that they can feel important.  While that can be true at times, Twitter is also an awesome resource to gain updated information on topics that are important to you and this includes health and fitness.  The following is a list of people or groups that I like to follow to increase my knowledge about health and fitness (their link followed by their profile info):

http://twitter.com/#!/DaveZinczenko - Editor-in-Chief, Men's Health & Women's Health; author of Abs Diet and Eat This, Not That! series and Today Show contributor.

http://twitter.com/#!/bbchealth

http://twitter.com/#!/TIMEHealthland - Visit TIME Healthland for expansive coverage of all things health & wellness including breaking news & medical research, diet & fitness, love & family and more

http://twitter.com/#!/WSJHealth - Health news coverage from the Wall Street Journal

http://twitter.com/#!/MensHealthMag - Men's Health magazine is your ultimate guide to fitness, health, weight loss, nutrition, sex, style and guy wisdom. (this is one of my favorites as they’ll tweet a few great articles each day)