About This Episode

3 Easy Steps to Reach Your Health Goals

Episode 136

Do you want to get healthier? Do you want to maintain or improve your health? Setting goals is crucial. But what if you struggle to follow through?  Then you’re in the right place. Stay tuned to learn three easy steps to reach your goal to get healthier.

Here we go again. You’ve decided you want to get healthy. Maybe you want to start exercising or eating better, lose a few or maybe even a lot of pounds. You want to sleep better and feel rested and energized. So you get started on your journey to get healthier.  And before long, or maybe not so long., you fizzle out. Or maybe you never even got out of the starting gate and you’re thinking, “Good grief. What is wrong with me that I can’t get it together?”

What if I told you you’re doing it all wrong. There is a way to succeed and it’s not hard.  Don’t believe me. Well, let me prove it.  I’m going to show you three easy steps to reach your goal to get healthier.

First let’s talk about what it means to be healthy. What does get healthier mean to you?  Seriously, I’d like for you to camp out on this question and don’t just listen to my voice. If you can, I would encourage you right now to push pause on this podcast and brainstorm some thoughts about what it means to you to get healthier and then come back.

I could give you a textbook definition of healthy. It just literally means to be in good health. That isn’t much clearer, is it? So, while I’ve got you on the hot seat answering questions, let me ask you this. How would you know if you are healthier?  Hmm, that brings it into a little bit clearer perspective, doesn’t it?

You see, if you can’t define it, and you can’t measure success, then it’s really not a plan. It’s an idea. It’s a hope. You know, I hope my blood pressure gets better and I don’t have a heart attack or a stroke. Or, I hope I can stay on a diet and fit into that dress that’s too small. Or, I hope I can sleep better and feel rested. 

I hope so too, but I’m pretty sure it’s hard to achieve goals that are so broad and so vague. Because, if you don’t know exactly what you mean by get healthy, then I’m confused about what your goal is and you really aren’t clear either.  I know. I know it’s hard. It’s hard to stay on a diet or be faithful to an exercise program or have good sleep habits or manage your stress or be intentional about meaningful connections and cut back or eliminate your alcohol intake or sugar or junk food. 

So what is it,  specifically what is it, that you are trying to accomplish when you say I want to get healthier?  And I hear a lot of people say, well, I want to be able to keep up with my kids or my grandkids so that I can play with them. And other people say, I don’t want to be like my mom. She was confined to the recliner for the last 10 years of her life due to poor health. Those are great motivators.  But they aren’t really specific goals either.

Why do you want to get healthier? Because once you figure that out, you can use it to motivate you to make changes that lead to better health.

Too many times we think we just don’t have enough motivation, or persistence, or willpower, or self discipline to achieve our goals. Or we get sidelined by ever present stress in our lives. Or we just slip back into old habits and give up.  But what set us up for failure in the first place was we didn’t know exactly where we were going. You have to have a clear destination in mind, a clear goal in the first place if you’re going to achieve success. 

If you’re going to get from wherever your current health is to wherever you want it to be, you’re going to need details. Lots of them. So start with nailing down the destination.

Do you want to get your blood pressure normal? Do you want to be able to run a 5k? Do you want to lose 5 pounds? Do you want to sleep through the night? Get clear and get specific and then get more specific.  Lifestyle medicine has six pillars.  Nutritional eating, restorative sleep, physical fitness, Social Connectedness, Stress Management, and minimizing exposure to harmful substances. Pick one to really work on and start drilling down to get to the place you want to end up in.  And yes, they’re all interconnected. If you want to lose weight, then not only do you need to focus on nutrition and physical fitness, you also need to focus on your social circles and your restorative sleep and managing your stress. They are interconnected, there is no doubt, but you likely will not be able to make sweeping changes all at once. 

 You need a specific destination and you need directions on how to get  from here to there. And that can’t mean I want to get healthier so I’m going to clean up my diet and exercise. If you don’t know exactly where you’re going, I guarantee you, you will never arrive. And that’s what happens to most people. And here’s the deal, when it comes to health, who arrives? I mean,  Health is a journey with mountains and valleys along the way and twists and turns and detours you didn’t expect.

If you set unrealistic goals, you set yourself up for failure and disappointment. And then you’d say, I tried, I tried, and it didn’t work. And really what you tried to do was never going to work.  So it’s important to set a goal that you know that you’re absolutely confident you can reach. 

And I know you may say, Oh, Dr. Vickie, I’ve tried and failed every time and I have no confidence in myself at all.  Then start small.  Nope, smaller than that.  Nope, even smaller than that. 

Now, if you’re someone who has seen success in making changes, changing your identity maybe, and seeing yourself as a healthy person and developing healthy habits, Then you might be able to set a bigger goal and take a bigger bite.  But if you’re disgusted with yourself because you always quit, then do a reality check and set a goal you can reach.

Set a goal that wouldn’t surprise you if you reached it. It wouldn’t even surprise your friends or family if you reached it. 

Once you have a clear goal, a clear destination, you know where you’re going, you have a clear plan on how to get there, the next step is to define the steps. 

 So what are the tiny steps you need to start taking? 

You have to do some prep work too.

What is the next tiny step you need to take? Do you need to wake up 10 minutes early every day and take a brisk walk? I’m talking about heart rate at 140, arms pumping, feet pounding the pavement.  Or do you need to do some prep work and clean out your freezer and cabinets and refrigerator and get rid of all the ice cream and cake and cookies?  do you just need to power down your TV and computer and smartphone an hour earlier so you can get some more restorative sleep?

Do you need to put salt substitute in the salt shaker? Do you need to add more fiber to your diet so you don’t get hungry and eat everything you can get your hands on in the heat of the moment?  And by the way, if that’s your answer, I have a free download on fiber and where you can find it.  And so this would probably be a good time to tell you that I offer lots of resources to my listeners who are on my email list.

You can go to healthylooksgreatonyou. com to sign up  and I’ll put a link in the show notes.   There’s also several episodes on all the lifestyle medicine pillars that you’ll probably find helpful in helping you get to your destination.

Do you see how specific these steps are and how small they are? They’re not the goal. They’re steps that move you toward your goal. Now you’ve probably heard of the term smart goals, but we’re going to review it anyway, because it’s such a foundation for developing good habits.

S stands for specific, and we’ve kind of harped on that. M stands for measurable. Remember at the beginning I said how are you going to measure that? A stands for achievable. We’ve talked about that as well. R stands for relevant. Like if you’re going to try to lower your blood pressure putting salt substitute in the salt shaker is relevant to achieving your goal. And then T is time bound. Nothing  And I mean nothing motivates me more than a deadline. So give yourself a deadline. If you need to do some prep work and get your pantry cleaned out and your refrigerator cleaned out and go to the store and buy some different healthy foods to stock it with, then do that. But give yourself a deadline. We all need a timetable.   You can actually put this on your calendar. I put everything in my calendar on my phone. If I think I need to eat oatmeal on Monday morning to fill my belly up with some fiber so I don’t get hungry at 10 o’clock in the morning and go looking for a Pop Tart, then you know what? I can put that in my phone on my calendar. Eat a bowl of oatmeal.  Right there on my calendar. I check it every day it’s more efficient and it works better than putting something on your to do list. 

Now, I want to give you a little bit of encouragement.  You need to celebrate your wins.  And you need to mark your progress. And don’t celebrate your win with something that’s contrary to your goal. In other words, if you go a whole week eating only whole food, don’t reward yourself with processed and junk food, but reward yourself and just celebrate, celebrate your wins.

Some people use chips. We talked about in our episode on Unwinding Pain, putting paperclips together. This is an important concept in the recovery world for people who are trying to quit smoking or trying to quit drinking and they celebrate how many days of abstinence they’ve gotten to, 

but here’s the deal. Sometimes you’re going to fall off the wagon, whether it’s having a drink when you had planned not to, or grabbing that bowl of ice cream right before you go to bed when you had sworn off ice cream.  Listen, give yourself a little bit of grace.

And also, understand this. There are unexpected detours on the way, but just because you’re on the detour doesn’t mean you’re not heading in the right direction  And what about accountability?

Yes, we all know how critical accountability is. So if you can get someone in your life to give you accountability. That’s fantastic and you can celebrate your success with them as well.

I have a course called 7 Day Prescription for Change. It has a downloadable workbook and it’s all free. And you get an email with a little bit of homework every day to help you work through some things like ambivalence. You know,  those feelings of I want to do this but I can’t. But I want to do that and those things keep us from changing.

We need to learn a little bit about our own selves and our behavior if we’re going to make changes and some techniques like habit stacking where every single day I know I’m going to. Put on my socks so I can put a set of hand weights in front of my sock drawer and say, I’m not going to open that drawer until I do 10 bicep curls.

Just little things like that, that you connect habits together are powerful ways to help you achieve success.  And if you need accountability from a professional state, then you can visit my website, EquilibriumTelehealth. com. I have a medical practice where I help patients one on one. 

But I believe you can get to wherever it is you want to go, by following three easy steps to get healthier. Number one, set a small, specific, achievable goal that you can start moving towards. tomorrow. Know your destination clearly. Hey, take a picture when you get there. And if you can’t picture it in full color,  keep painting until you know exactly where you’re going.   Number two is start heading there. Identify three very small things that you know you can do every single solitary day to help you move forward. Three little steps. Never, ever, ever stop moving forward. And then when you’ve seen success in those three areas, celebrate it and set three more steps that keep moving you in the right direction.  

Now, number three, and this, we haven’t talked about it yet, but this is the single most impactful thing that will help you reach your goals. This will make more difference than anything else. 

Write it down.  Writing it down  increases your chances for success  by 50%.  I mean, how easy is that?  Just write it down. And better yet, write it down and share it with someone because then you’ve got a little accountability.

 You know, this episode is almost over and we haven’t even been to mini medical school, but let’s step into the neuroscience classroom for just a minute and talk about why writing down your goals make so much difference. 

You see, there is this biological process called encoding. We receive sensory input from our sense of smell, sight, touch, taste, and sound.  And all of these things travel into our brain into an area known as the hippocampus.  And that’s where they’re sort of analyzed and we make decisions about what we’re going to store and what we’re going to just forget about. 

And when we write something down, we’re using another sense. We’re not only using our eyes because we see it, but we’re using the sense of touch because we’re writing it. And if we say it out loud, then we’re adding an auditory component. 

And all of this adds to the importance that our hippocampus attaches to what we’re doing.  And that stores it deeper in our memory. It encodes it more specifically into our brain.

That’s why the smartest people you know always take notes when they’re attending a lecture or some type of seminar.  So get out your pencil and write down those goals, encode it in your brain, and you’ll be more likely to succeed.  Those three steps are a formula for success. Healthy is a journey. It’s not a destination. But it’s worth the time and effort and investment to get healthy. Because healthy looks great on you  

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