NEW YEAR. NEW YOU?
Are you one of the many people around the world who has made New Year’s resolutions to start afresh and improve your life? From losing weight to giving up smoking, people convince themselves they’ll follow through on their resolutions, yet time and time again, those well intentioned and optimistic goals are abandoned, often before the end of January! So why is it so hard to change old habits?
WE ARE CREATURES OF HABIT
Our daily lives involve high levels of repetition of activities within similar contexts. We buy the same foods from the same supermarket, cook with the same ingredients, and usually sit at the same place at the office or dinner table, but when questioned about these routine activities, most people barely remember the details of their actions. Habits are automatic behaviours you repeat on a regular basis and in which you engage without conscious awareness or deliberate control. In fact, habits account for 45% of your everyday behaviours; they form gradually over time and eventually become second nature. Some habits are positive and help you to operate efficiently, while others are negative (‘bad’) and can require a great deal of effort to break.
An estimated 58% of the UK population have set themselves New Year’s resolutions for 2023. That’s 30 million people taking deliberate steps to better themselves as the year kicks off.
THE BENEFITS OF A NUTRITION & LIFESTYLE COACH
Achieving your goals is as much to do with your body as it is to do with your mind, which is why working with a Functional Nutritionist that’s also qualified as a Lifestyle and NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) can provide you with a huge amount of expertise while also empowering you to achieve success by rewiring your mind, breaking old habits and forming new ones in the process.
One of the main beliefs in NLP is that you have all the resources inside yourself to achieve what you desire. NLP helps you tap into those inner resources and overcome your limiting beliefs that are holding you back.
THE RECIPE FOR SUCCESS
1. DEVELOP A STRATEGY
One of the main reasons people don’t see their resolutions through is that they lack the right framework or strategy to achieve their goals. Vague goals such as ‘being thinner’ or unrealistic goals like ‘losing 5kg in one month’ set you up for failure.
Nutritional therapy and lifestyle coaching helps you to achieve your goals by creating a strategy in the form of a Nutrition & Lifestyle Action Plan. This is a personalised plan with clearly defined and realistic goals that can be monitored over time to track your progress.
Not everyone has the same determination or capacity when it comes to breaking old ways of eating or acquiring new patterns of behaviour but the awareness brought about by having a plan, and a health coach supporting you to pursue that plan is vital to your success.
Being accountable gives you added motivation while also making you feel supported in a communal effort towards a specific goal, rather than feeling alone or tempted to deviate from your plan.
2. TAKE ACTION & FORM POSITIVE HABITS
Your good intentions are great, but unless you develop new habits your chances for success are pretty much nonexistent. Forming positive habits is key to reaching a long-term goal but because habits are often formed unconsciously they are hard to correct. That is why it is essential, with the help of a coach, to bring awareness to ‘bad’ habits and unconscious behaviours that are detrimental to your health goals. With this awareness, it becomes much easier to avoid negative behaviours and instead take small actions every day that, repeated over time, change your behaviour and push you towards your objective.
Sustained motivation and consistency are the secret to lasting change. When we are consistent and persevere, we obtain the reward. Establishing good habits is paramount and will be crucial in your process.
3. TRACK YOUR PROGRESS
A Nutritional Therapy and Llifestyle Coach employs various tracking techniques to monitor your overall progress. A Food & Symptoms Diary combined with regular check-ins is an excellent way for us to see what is and isn’t working, and make small adjustments accordingly.
Lifestyle coaching helps you achieve your resolutions, guiding you with NLP to change deep seated habits by altering the neural pathways responsible for those actions. The brain tends to resist change and choose what is familiar, instantly rewarding, pleasurable and comforting rather than working on the changes needed to achieve the goal you set on the 1st of January. This is the reason why New Year’s resolution do not last. It takes a lot of conscious work and will power to undo unconscious behaviours and rewire the mind.
Tracking your progress not only helps you evaluate where you are at in relation to your goal, but pushes you towards it by motivating you and positively reinforcing your efforts.
Your Health. Your Choice.
At Nutrition Diets we focus on the small, manageable and consistent steps needed to achieve your goal. Remember that quick results never last, and slow and steady wins the race. We are here to support you on your journey towards improved physical, mental and spiritual health.
Wishing you all a blessed and healthy 2023!
