A List for Hard Days

In the last couple of posts, I talked about some of the essential components needed to reach your goals including taking action and writing out your goal. Without doing that, you can’t even get started. But what will keep you going once you do get started? All the best intentions in the world are not going to help you when things get really challenging. The things I’ve mentioned do help but I have one more thing to make it even more likely that you’ll reach your goal.

Let’s start with an example such as dieting. You go out to eat with all the best intentions to stick to a healthy, low-calorie diet. Then you find yourself there with a salad in front of you while your companions are enjoying prime rib and pizza and suddenly, your mouth is salivating nonstop. You begin to wonder, Why in the world am I dieting when I could just be enjoying myself? Somehow, maybe because your friends know you are on a diet, you stay strong and dig into your salad.

The next day, you see yourself in the mirror and can smile at yourself, knowing you stuck to your goal. In the afternoon, you are out playing ball with the kids for an hour instead of just ten minutes which had been your limit in previous times. It’s times like those that make it easy to remember why you’re changing the way you eat. In those moments, you can honestly say you don’t miss those grande mochas with whipped cream or the bowl of ice cream after dinner.

Unfortunately, your day isn’t filled with those reminders and maybe the next day you’re at work, a co-worker walks in with donuts for everyone and you hear your inner voice asking you why you are torturing yourself, making all the reasons you wanted to diet a little fuzzy all of a sudden. That’s when the idea of just one donut doesn’t seem like a truly bad thing and there’s no one at work that knows about your diet goal to help keep you on track. It’s then that you need a true will power tool.

The tool I think that works the best for this is something I call B-RAM. You can read about it in Chapter 7 of my book, How to Ignite Your Passion for Living. B-RAM stands for Benefits, Reasons, and Motivations. This B-RAM is a list of the real end goals you’re after. Losing weight isn’t just about looking good, it’s about feeling better, getting off medication, reducing your risk of disease, and increasing your energy so you can do more for yourself and your family. You know this is why you do it but in those really trying moments, they are just hard to remember clearly.

With a B-RAM list though, all you do is write down the list of the reason you are chasing this goal, then you can pull the list out and read it over to remind yourself. You’ll want to keep that list as handy as possible. Maybe put it on your phone, on an index card in your wallet, or on sticky notes posted on your glove compartment and bathroom mirror.

To make this B-RAM list really effective, you must list every single benefit, reason, and motivation that will make this goal worth working so hard for. The longer the list, the easier it will be to keep on track because you can see, just by looking at your big, long list, that those trying moments are really worth getting through. Then when you read it, you’re reminded of all the good things you can look forward to when you reach that goal.

If you can just read your lists and keep yourself going, soon you won’t spend any time wondering why you work so hard or why you don’t just give up. How come? Because soon enough, you’ll be living with those benefits, not just reading about them!

Avoiding Those Holidays Traps

Next week is Thanksgiving. Soon after that there’s Christmas and then New Years. It’s that dreaded holiday time when we are faced with many temptations that make it hard to stick to our goals, especially healthy diets. It doesn’t take much to regain that hard-won weight loss or bring your health down and it can be infinitely harder to get back to where you want to be.

So, for the next few weeks I thought I’d focus on healthy eating in this time of endless traps. Staying healthy is important for you to keep up your energy and motivation which you need to accomplish all the great things you have planned.

Although you don’t want to let a bit too much pumpkin pie spoil things for you, staying healthy during the holidays doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy yourself. In fact, you should go out there and celebrate with gusto. Just be discerning about what and how much you eat or drink. To do so, just follow a few simple rules:

• Go ahead and enjoy a small cupcake or one sugar cookie during festivities but stop at that. It’s not the sweets that are the problem as much as eating too many of them.
• Eat slowly and savor the occasional treat you do have. Eating slowly will delay having to fight the temptation to have seconds and, hopefully, when you are done with it, you will feel satisfied enough not to feel.
• Keep healthy snacks close at hand. Grab some apple slices or crunchy veggies when you have the overwhelming temptation to gobble up a whole plate of cookies.
• Don’t fall into the “I’ve already been bad so it won’t matter if I keep eating too much of the wrong stuff” mentality and overindulge. Likewise, don’t brush off unhealthy eating by telling yourself you’ll do better after the holidays. Let yourself have the occasional treat then get back to your healthy diet.
• At parties, stay active to keep your metabolism up and your mind off the food. Dance, participate in all the games, wander the room, and mingle.
• Keep away from the food tables at parties. Move conversations to foodless corners of the place.
• Keep your eye on the big picture. Review your goals and what you want out of your life daily so it’s at the forefront of your mind when the cookies get passed around the office.

You can also read more about the importance of health and great things you can do to improve it in Chapter Ten of my book, How To Ignite Your Passion for Living.

I’ll be talking about more helpful ideas for this time of year so to ensure you get my posts, sign up on this page here. If you find these posts really helpful, you might share this blog with your friends and family who can also sign up on the page I linked.