Healthy Weight for Life: The 5 stages of lifestyle change
Michael Hallinan

So youre determined youre going to do something about your weight. But what? Losing weight is not in itself a behavior. Releasing fat pounds is an outcome of many behaviors that add up to consuming more calories than your expending. (Yes, theres a genetic component too, but you cant change that.)

The good thing is that this gives you lots of places to start moving toward your goal of losing weight. The challenge is sorting through them all and finding what will work best for you. So heres the question: What are you most ready to change?

Behavioral researchers have identified five stages in behavior change:

1. Precontemplation: Youre not even considering it. No way youre gonna give up your pizza and beer. Gym-going is not for you. Why walk when you can ride?

2. Contemplation: Well, maybe you could live without pizza and beer *every* week. Gym is out, but you always liked swimming, maybe a pool. The walk in the park with your friend was pleasant last weekend, maybe you could do it again.

3. Preparation: Next week youre going to skip that pizza. You found out the local Y has a pool and their family rates are affordable. You talked to your friend about doing more walks sometime.

4. Action: Two weeks and no pizza. You joined the Y and youve swum laps there a couple times. You and your friend have gone walking the past three Saturday mornings.

5. Maintenance: The weekly pizza has been a thing of the past for six months. Swimming is so much a part of your daily routine that you dont feel right if you skip it. Those Saturday walks are dont-miss tradition.

In fact, this readiness to change model is behavior-specific. That is, you might be in the action stage with the pizza but still in precontemplation on that exercise stuff. Youre not likely to be very successful if you flog yourself for not swimming laps every day, what you want to do is move yourself to the next stage: List the pros and cons of regular exercise and guess what, youre thinking about it and that means contemplation.

So think about the behaviors you can change to lose weight. What stage are you in for each of those behaviors? In each case, what can you do to move yourself to the next stage? What are you most ready to change.

We explore readiness to change in my free teleclass, The Real Skinny on Weight Loss: Dont Diet, Do It. You can get details and register at www.teleclassinternational.com/catalog.phtml?keywords=MH-RS

About the Author

Michael Hallinan overcame a lifelong obesity, and the midlife discovery of health and fitness so changed his life that he established a coaching practice specializing in helping others find their own healthy way to a healthy weight. For more helpful tips, subscribe to the Healthy Weight Newsletter. For past issues and to subscribe see
www.healthyweightcoaching.com/Ezine.htm

Tags: Action Stage, Author, Behavior Change, Behavioral Researchers, Calories, Contemplation, Couple Times, Daily Routine, Exercise, Genetic Component, lifelong obesity, Lifestyle Change, Losing Weight, Maintenance, Michael Hallinan, Pizza, Pool, Saturday Mornings, Six Months, Swimming Laps, Tradition, Walk In The Park, Walks, www.healthyweightcoaching.com/Ezine.htm, www.teleclassinternational.com/catalog.phtml?keywords=MH-RS —

Dieting to lose weight is just as hard or as easy as vigorous the habit. One way to look at this is to see how the build formed. Habits do not take place overnight. It is an accumulation of little things done over a course of time until the effect sets in.

Likewise, dieting to be really useful has to be gradual. So for now, stay off the crash dieting, fast reducing and fast fat burning menus, pills and concoctions. It may guarantee to reduce your weight but not your nutrition and well – being. True there are specific foods again food preparations that benefits particular health again weight issues. True also that fast reducing concoctions and food preparations are prepared not to really make you enjoy the simple pleasures of life like a good meal but for you to endure it. It is so painless to agree that there are hard rules to espy in harmony to lose weight fast without suffering and insure good nutrition in the process too. It is so politically deserved to advance that all the whence – called weight – reducing products do wonders for the body. Being politically correct though is not being honest.

The fact is everyone has claims, but oblivion is officially proven in the entire area of dieting to lose weight. Not one fast weight loss program is validated by a credible health organization. The best that is said is that a certain product is subservient study, is under weighty origin, or is still waiting laboratory confirmation. Until then, stay ice it but here are things that you can move to regain your ideal weight while being kind to your body in the process.

Dispose now
Make small changes in your approach to slop. The little changes you cause now will spell a platoon of weight and nutrition problems later. Contemplation at it as an investment. Treat it as a way of loving yourself. It is like this. If we want for example to prepare for retirement, we countdown saving early. The earlier we start the better and the longer the front – time we have to save. The too many we save the preferred we enjoy. Likewise, reducing the amount of food that we eat today, no matter how small the portions are, when done overtime will ultimately be the difference between being obese or fit. It will spell the difference between being healthy or ill and between being fashionable or waddling in oversized clothes. Changing the eating habit cannot be put off whereas long because the longer authentic takes for a person to take resolve, the harder the shot to make the resolve becomes.

Eat well
Every fodder has its purpose. Food in any region did not just happen. Certain is there for the people to flip for and to take the right and balanced nourishment. It is the choices, the preferences, and the current activity that judgment the refreshment provided to the body. Since eat well. Get nutrition from all the six meat groups and do it regularly. The main actuation that there is too much noise regarding overweight is not because there is fat, sodium, and sugar in the meal. It is because today, 150 million people are obese because they eat more than three times the required daily intake of fat and calories.

Pump Iron
Dieting to lose weight is not complete when not coupled lock up exercises. While eating the right foods in the equitable proportion, exercise. It will help to distribute the correct nourishment to the targeted areas in the body.

And then you enjoy, live well, feel good, and look good.

24 Hour Fitness
http://www.www.24-hr-fitness.com

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