
Are the healthy habits you adopted in January starting to be a drag? Perhaps you’re on the verge of giving up…again. Before you throw in the proverbial towel, consider these three strategies to nurture your habits a little longer. You can do this!
Take Perfection Off the Table
Do you feel the need to follow your diet plan 100% of the time? Does it seem like habit change is not worth doing if you can’t do it perfectly? We know that humans are not perfect, so let’s just remove perfection from the requirements list altogether. Not only is it unrealistic, it also prevents you from growing. And when we stop chasing perfection, we benefit in at least a few ways:
- We open our minds to new ways of accomplishing our goals. There’s more than one way to start eating more veggies or drinking more water, so there’s no need to expect to follow a plan perfectly.
- We get better at seeing mistakes or deviations from the plan as learning opportunities. If you didn’t hit the mark on some aspect of your new habit, ask yourself why. Then spend time thinking about what you might do to prevent that from happening again.
- We decrease the stress involved in making lifestyle changes. Change is hard enough without putting extra pressure on yourself to do it perfectly.
Focus on Process Goals Instead of Outcomes
When we set a goal, many of us make it all about the outcome. Being able to do an unassisted pull-up. Fitting into a certain pair of jeans. Or lowering LDL blood cholesterol by the next doctor appointment. Goals are good motivators and can help us keep going when the work gets boring or challenging. But if the anticipated outcome is all we look forward to for months, the process itself risks being unfulfilling. And that’s when we’re more likely to stray off course or abandon our efforts. Instead of only keeping our eyes on the final prize, we need to set process goals.
Process goals are mini-goals that are attainable and supportive of the outcome you desire. Think of them as stepping stones to land on as you progress through the process of changing your habits. They work best when they aren’t focused just on the outcome, but on building skills to support that outcome. For example, maybe your end goal is to improve your cholesterol levels. In that case, a good healthy habit to build would be eating more vegetables or having more meatless meals. Once you make that decision, you can set the appropriate process goal for these healthy habits, such as adding an extra serving of vegetables to your lunch or dinner most days of the week. Or eating two meatless dinners each week.
Process goals are generally easy to track. And, once you accomplish them, you can add to them or layer on new ones to continue to challenge yourself. You can still hold your ultimate goal out there as your finish line. But giving yourself mini-goals along the way can help you maintain enthusiasm and commitment—and even enjoy the process.
Move From “Controlling” to “Managing”
Let’s say your goal is to lose weight. Does that mean your plan is to control your food intake? If so, there’s a good chance you’re in for a struggle simply because of the word “control.” It implies that it’s you against the food, or that the food has some power over you that must be taken back. Nobody wants to feel like they are in a battle for better habits! But we don’t have to strong-arm our appetites or bodies into submission. Control doesn’t build healthy habits. What we need to do is manage our food intake. And there are various ways we can do that to make habits easier to sustain.
To manage a situation, first we investigate what needs to be done. Then we consider different ways to get it done, and are prepared to modify our actions based on how things are progressing. We can work on our healthy habits by following this same process. For example, if you want to decrease the amount of added sugar you consume, you could:
- Investigate to determine what foods or drinks are contributing most of the sugar to your diet. (Maybe it’s the sweet coffees you purchase twice a day, plus nightly candy in front of the TV.) Pro tip: If you routinely purchase a certain product but don’t have it on hand, check the free Guiding Stars app (or the website). There you can see the product’s Nutrition Facts label, Guiding Stars rating (and reasons it earned the rating), ingredient list, allergens, and other diet-related information.
- Consider several options for modifying your consumption of those particular foods and drinks. For example, order your coffees with half the sugar syrup to start, then gradually decrease it. Or measure out a small portion of candy instead of eating liberally from the bag each night.
- Decide how you’ll modify your plan if your original ideas aren’t working well. If the half-syrup coffee isn’t appealing, ask for sugar-free syrup in the regular amount and see if you like that. If measuring out the candy is a hassle, switch to chewing sugarless gum a few nights a week and gradually increase the number of nights.
One can only maintain “control” for so long before it becomes tiresome or too stressful or simply feels bad mentally. “Managing” feels much more doable for the long term—it’s the best approach to keep your healthy habits going strong.