Who hasn’t made a New Year’s Resolution at some point (or many times) during previous years, and who hasn’t blown off more than a few during their lifetime? This year, set one or more realistic goals to improve your health, fitness and/or peace of mind using one or more of the tips below.
List Your Goals
Write down both your outcome and process goals for improving your wellness. This means not just setting outcome goals such as “lose 10 pounds” or “reduce my stress,” but instead creating the specific process or plan for doing so.
Include success measurements, action dates, resources, activities and friends who might help you. Review health and wellness goals you want to address, which might include plans for prevention or improvement in the following areas:
- Heart health
- Sports performance
- Sleep management (very important!)
- Bone health
- Weight loss or management
- Stress reduction
- Lower back problems
- Improving blood pressure
- Stopping smoking
- Addressing substance abuse
- Lack of physical activity
- Gut health
Did you know the Apple Store has more than 40,000 health and wellness apps? And many are free. Add some technology to your health and wellness plan this year by signing up for websites like MyFitnessPal or LIVESTRONG. Invest in a smart watch, heart rate monitor or pedometer to track your physical activity each day.
Visit a Registered Dietitian
A registered dietitian (not a nutritionist) can often offer better health and wellness advice than a physician. If you’ve never met with an RDN, you’ll be in for a pleasant surprise at how much one can help you turn your life around. After taking your family and personal history, an RDN will be able to pinpoint your specific health and wellness risks and create specific therapeutic dietary plans to help you avoid, manage or eliminate them.
Improve Your Cooking Skills
The fewer processed foods you eat, the fewer additives, preservatives, growth hormones, antibiotics and other unhealthy ingredients you’ll put into your body each day. You don’t need to become a chef to learn how to quickly and easily prepare great-tasting, healthy breakfasts, lunches and dinners.
Don’t want to sign up for a cooking class? Search virtually any cooking topic on YouTube and you’ll find a video that shows you how to cook that recipe. Improve your knife skills, learn how to prepare proteins correctly and find out how you can do more with your microwave than just heat foods on high.
Root through your cupboards and shelves and pull out appliances you haven’t used in a while to start adding more techniques to your cooking skills.
Add New Foods to Your Diet
Check out our list of Super Foods and start adding new fruits, veggies, whole grains, nuts, fats and proteins to your diet. Check out our blog post “What Are Super Foods?” (AMY, ADD LINK HERE) and then start researching ways to add them more often to your meals and snacks.
Find a Wellness Buddy
Don’t go it alone. Find a friend who wants to improve his or her health this year and get together to create and share your plans. Stating your goals publicly puts more pressure on you not to blow off that workout or not to order that dessert. Text and email each other whenever your come across something interesting on the Internet.
Send an email update each Sunday night to review what you accomplished the past week and to discuss any changes you’ve decided to make to your plan during the past seven days.
Keep a Journal
Each night before you go to bed, write down anything that occurred during the day that relates to your wellness plan. You don’t have a write a chapter – just writing a few notes to document what you did during the day will give you valuable information you can review each week to keep you motivated. You can write down your meals and snacks each day, as well as any exercise you did.
Manage Time/Reduce Stress
Stress can stem from financial problems, relationships, work, poor health or other problems. One of the reasons stress builds up is because we don’t address and try to hide it by burying ourselves in activities. In some cases, we simply have too much to do to find the time to sit down and examine what’s causing our stress.
Try to create a weekly calendar to budget time for grocery shopping, laundry, housework, bill paying and other regular chores in advance so you don’t put them off, let them build up and create stress because of a lack of time.
Buy/Borrow One Piece of Exercise Equipment
You can get in great shape without a single piece of exercise equipment, but gadgets and machine can make exercise fun. Look into learning how to use resistance bands, dumbbells, a kettlebell or a cardio machine. You can find almost anything you want used and inexpensive on Craigslist, or get it free by sending an email blast to friends and co-workers asking if anyone has any exercise equipment they don’t want anymore.