What To Do Before Starting a New Diet
If your goal is to lose weight, gain muscle mass, or improve your sports performance, follow this series or sign up for personalized health coaching.
How do I start building a healthy life?
Before jumping into changing your diet or workout habits, start by doing a self-evaluation of why you need to add more healthy habits to your life. As we discover our “why”, we give our mind a justification to stay focused on our goals.
Why do you want to change your eating habits? Why do you want to work out more? Maybe you want to lose 15 kilos by next spring. Or maybe you want to win a triathlon.
This “why” is your final goal in this journey.
Why do I want to lose weight? Why do I want to gain muscles?
Here is the key – once you find your goal, you are not yet done. Dig deeper again, and ask yourself why that goal matters.
For example: Why do I want to lose 15 kilos by next spring? Because it will make me feel more confident and beautiful? Because I have a special outfit I want to wear on an occasion?
When you find this answer, try again. Why do I want to lose weight to feel more confident? Because I want to enjoy life more? Because I want to be present for my family and friends instead of worrying about what I look like in pictures or in the mirror?
Continue until your final Why is so powerful that you feel like you must achieve your goal.
Divide and conquer
Your big goal sounds daunting, doesn’t it? Now you have your strong Why, and are aching to achieve the goal, but it seems far away. You won’t win a competition in your sport next month if you currently place in the bottom third, and you won’t lose 15 kilos overnight.
We humans tend to set very complex goals that will take a long time to achieve, which decreases our chances of success and – even worse – increases our chances of developing frustration.
To avoid this frustration, take your big goal and break it down into smaller goals. Maybe a step towards winning a half marathon would be improving your running pace by 20 seconds in the next 2 months. A step towards losing 15 kilos by the spring is losing 4 kilos in the next two months.
These smaller goals will be crucial to keep you motivated throughout the journey towards a healthy life.
Divide your goal into three or four smaller goals with a shorter deadline that you can accomplish more flexibly.
Ready to start?
If you’re unsure where to begin, keep reading! On this blog, I’ll share tips about nutrition, exercise and more, starting with a series on the pillars for a healthy life. These pillars can give you ideas into what you could do to achieve your own goal. In my next post for this series, I talk about how and why to stay hydrated.
If you’d like some more help from me, you can also sign up for personalized health coaching via this form.
Let’s get started!
