Weight Loss Solutions: Choose Small Consistent Steps For Success
By: Melissa McCreery, PhD
It’s one thing to read about the alarming increase in obesity in our country. It’s a stunning thing to see this visual depiction of the growing problem on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website—check this out (hint: keep an eye on the changing map):
http://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpa/obesity/trend/maps/
Despite the millions of dollars being spent on weight loss every year, we are dramatically moving in the wrong direction, and clearly the advertising enticing us to try the newest “quick fix” isn’t helping the way the ads promise it should.
So what to do? The need for long term, enduring solutions is greater than ever. When we see a huge problem, we are tempted to think big. The problem is, big changes usually overwhelm. It is important to remember that the path to permanent change is so often achieved through consistent but small, reasonable sized steps. Rapid drastic changes don’t fit easily with our lives and they often don’t last.
This week, I challenge you to come up with one small reasonable step that you can take to improve the health of you and your family. Select a step that you can imagine sticking with for the next ten years—not a short term fix. Think reasonable and think realistic. Think about improving something about your lifestyle just one notch. Think about a pace that you can live with.
The change you select might be serving plates in the kitchen instead of at the table or leaving the salt shaker in the cupboard. It might be cutting the sugar you put in your coffee in half or cutting your TV time by 30 minutes to do something more active. Maybe you’ll decide to always take the parking spot half a row farther away then you need to. Be creative but think honestly about who you are, what your family will tolerate and what you can commit to.
Leave a comment and let me know what you commit to. Let’s start changing the map!
Take good care,
Melissa
Hi Holly, Thanks for posting. Bravo to you for the changes you have made! It’s amazing how those small changes really do add up—and they are so much easier to be consistent with!
I started some small changes five years ago and I find they are still part of my routine. Two of the easiest things for me were to switch to eating on a salad plate instead of a dinner plate and parking a distance from the door. Unfortunately, I was less sucessful on my more important changes of exercising 5 times per week and keeping snacks out of my house. So I broke those down into smaller steps. For example stop consuming soda, chips , and popcorn.