by Sheila Kalas, personal trainer and owner of Fitness Plus
When you achieve the goal of accepting total personal responsibility for your health and fitness, you reap rewards.
The first step of accepting responsibility for your health and fitness is the most important. You must admit it: admit that you and only you are responsible for your wellness. This is simple, but not always easy. We are taught to look elsewhere and place blame.
We blame the fast food industry, the advertising industry, for “making” us eat too much junk food. We blame our genetics for our less-than-perfect bodies and for making it impossible to lose weight. We blame our busy lives for never having the time to work out. We even blame our age. If I were only younger I could work out, and on and on.
1. Stopping the blame game is the first step. Stop looking around at other people and other things and using them as excuses to stay unfit, overweight and unhealthy. Once you realize that you have the power to make some positive changes in your life to improve your health and fitness, you will. Keep making excuses and saying that it can’t be done, and you will stay exactly where you are.
Once you have given yourself permission to be in control, you are on your way. So now what?
2. Prioritizing is a great next step. Make a prioritized list of what, in terms of improving health and fitness, you want to do. These priorities should be personal to you, but in step with the goal of improving health and fitness. They should also be specific. A priority like “looking better” is too general and can easily fall out of the health and fitness vein. You can change your hairstyle and look better, but not have improved your health at all.
Common priorities are things like increase cardiovascular fitness, lower cholesterol, improve bone density, reduce back pain, lose weight. Put some thought into your priorities. They are the key to the direction that your journey towards improved health and fitness will take.
Once you have your list of health/fitness priorities, then it is time to make some goals.
3. Any goal is more likely to be achieved if it is based on something that is truly important to you. The priority list helps assure you that the goals are based on things you have identified as being important to you. Goals should also be specific. If one of your priorities is to lose weight, then your goal should say how much and in how much time. You also might have a goal to eat two pieces of fruit a day, instead of high calorie snacks, to help you lose weight; you may have a goal of playing a back pain-free round of golf or lowering your cholesterol by 20 points. Try to make at least one goal for each priority.
Once you have established goals, it is a good idea to put them away for a few days and then review them with a fresh mind. Sometimes you get a little excited when making goals and they drift into the “unattainable” category. This is not good. Goals must be reasonable and attainable. The purpose of goals is to motivate. Establishing unattainable goals with have the opposite effect: it will demoralize you into quitting. Goals should fit your ability and your life. Make sure, when setting goals, you take into account things like work, family, time, budget.
When you have a list of goals that you know are reasonable, attainable (with work, of course), it’s time to make a plan.
4. It is at this stage that you can look to others to help you without feeling like you are giving the responsibility to someone else. When you seek the help of someone else for a plan, e.g., a trainer, a nutritionist or walking partner, AFTER you have established your own priorities and goals, it is an extension of personal responsibility, not a substitute for it.
There is nothing wrong or weak about seeking help to succeed. In fact, this increases your chance for success. Making a plan that will result in reaching your goals requires you to identify the areas in which you need help. You may have a perfectly reasonable goal, such as in increase your core strength, but have no idea how to do it. This does not mean it is a bad goal, it just means that you need help to achieve it. The help in this instance is education and/or instruction.
It is a good plan to hire a qualified trainer to educate you in this area so you can reach your goal. Your plan has to help you reach the goals you have set forth. Your plan may require you to go to a gym, get up earlier to walk before work, change your shopping and eating out habits, among others.
A plan is essential. Don’t just make priorities and goals with no thought of how you are going to achieve them. Goals alone don’t mean anything, it’s how you plan to achieve them that’s important.
5. The last step is simple. Just do it. Put your plan into action. If you have taken the time to follow these steps, then this should be the easy part. Try to remember that the plan you are about to start is something that you designed, based on your life’s priorities.
You are not doing what someone else told you you need to do. You are doing what you decided you need to do. It is always much easier to work on something for yourself than for someone else. This is your plan, so take pride in it, enjoy it and reap the benefits of its brilliant design.
Do you have some type of plan for financing your retirement? We understand that money invested early in life will pay benefits later in life. Even if it is painful at the time, saving and investing money when you are young will increase the quality of your life in later years.
