Tag Archives: habits

8 Ways to Make a Healthy New Year’s Resolution

New years is right around the corner, meaning everyone is determining their New Year’s resolution. What will yours be? For most/many, it is to lose weight or to get into shape. Here are a few helpful tips for getting you a jump start on your weight loss goal:

1. Start small. Make realistic, attainable goals. You want to stay motivated, so by setting and meeting small goals will keep your fire burning and you will feel strong to take on another more challenging goal.

2. Try to eat out less often. Unless you are personally preparing your food you truly have no idea what or how many calories and fat you are taking in.

3. Incorporate exercise into your routine. If you’re not ready for daily exercise, doing some every other day would be great, especially if you never exercise. (more…)

Advertising Dramatic Life Change

Dramatic Relief is another technique for lifestyle change that has been adopted by anti-obesity and healthy living campaigns. It has also been used frequently in anti-smoking campaigns. Dramatic Relief can be used no matter your goal, and is designed to help move you from the Contemplation stage to Determination and towards Action. Dramatic Relief works by creating an experience of increased emotion which is followed by a relief from that emotion if a step towards life change is taken. Dramatic experiences can include anything moving such as testimonies, psychodrama, and media campaigns. These type of ad campaigns use uncomfortable emotions, such as fear, disgust, or guilt, so people are motivated to do something not to feel this same way again.

It is the idea used in “reverse thinspiration,” or when someone puts a picture of themselves at their highest weight on the refrigerator. It’s the reason we call loved ones after watching a sappy movie or go clean the kitchen after reading an article about salmonella. It’s hard to imagine driving your kids through a fast food restaurant and not portioning their servings after driving by one of these billboards:

(more…)

Improve Your Health by Being Informed

One of the first steps to making a life change is moving from the stage of precontemplation to contemplation, becoming more aware that your life could be improved in some way and how the status quo could be less than helpful. A process that can help you in this stage transition is known as Consciousness Raising. Consciousness Raising can occur purposefully or you may stumble upon information. Regularly visiting DietsInReview.com presents more opportunities for new information to be integrated into your consciousness; however, not everything we blog directly applies to you and your goals. Stumbling upon information would be as if someone unexpectedly handed you a brochure or flyer about what you needed to know while you were walking down the street one day. Checking out books from the library on the subject would be purposefully increasing your own awareness. (more…)

Positive Reinforecement Supports Positive Habit Changes

When explaining the formation of a habit, I mentioned reinforcing behavior that you want to encourage. Our behavior is shaped by the consequences of our choices. Behaviorism discusses positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, positive punishment, and negative punishment as the major ways to shape behavior. In this theory, positive means adding something to a situation, negative means removing something from a situation, reinforcement is used to encourage a behavior, and punishment is used to discourage a behavior. (more…)

4 Steps to Creating New Habits

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit. Aristotle

Habits are extremely powerful and, by nature, something that we do without thinking. Aristotle’s quotation can be illustrated with the simple explanation of saying “excuse me” after you sneeze. As a child, you had many things to learn about sneezing; your parents probably had to teach you to put your hand (or elbow) over your mouth, to use a Kleenex, not to sneeze on other people, and to say “excuse me.” Sneezing is automatic, but everything that follows is learned. Ideally, from the time you were able, every time you would sneeze, your mother would follow up with “say excuse me” to which you would oblige. Also, at some point your mother would explain to you that this is appropriate social behavior, although she probably said you need to ‘be polite’ to have friends. (more…)

Eat to Live, Don’t Live to Eat

Last week, Dr. Phil told his contestants that we need to eat to live not live to eat. Food is the body’s fuel. It is what keeps our hearts beating, our brains running, and our feet moving. Just like other sources of energy, some are higher quality and give us better results than others. Primarily, food is about nutrition and energy; however, we use food for many other purposes.

The majority of first dates include food. Men buy food on dates to demonstrate that they can provide, and it gives us something to do with our nervous hands, a reason to pause and consider what you will say while your mouth is full, and something to look at to avoid eye contact. The majority of our social contacts include food in some form.  We share food to nurture one another; it is a way to say ‘I care about you, your comfort, and your health’. Also, as we mentioned, food is a powerful drug that can impact us physically and emotionally. The emotional aspects, seem to be Dr. Phil’s primary concern in how food may be misused. It’s when we start using food as a drug or a filler than it becomes a problem; that’s when our calories become empty.

According to Dr. Phil’s quiz Are You An Emotional Eater, I would venture that nearly all of us at least have “room for improvement”. Personally, I think there is a balance and you can still make smart choices without limiting yourself socially or completely ignoring your body’s cravings. Even chocolate has researched benefits on mood, but eating a tub of rocky road is not going to be helpful in the short term or the long term. (more…)