Secrets to Successful Change Series: Part 3
The story is all too familiar. We have a SMART goal to increase our health and wellness. We pick a date to beginning a change in our lives (often on New Year’s Day). We have the best of intentions of reaching this goal. We are determined. We start out strong, and are successful for a while. However, as soon as our lives become a little more stressful, our willpower gives out, and we fall back into our less-healthy routines.
How can we turn a well-designed goal into a successful adventure? The good news is there are a few techniques we can implement in our lives that can help us on our road to success. To provide an example, I would like to take a moment to introduce you to: “The Bet”
THE BET
On a fateful day in April, my wonderful husband sent me a link to a website about a family who gave up consuming sugar for an entire year (link is found below). I found it interesting, and suggested that maybe our family should try it. What I forgot was that my husband is known for making large, orchestrated bets with some of our friends (like giving up soda, coffee, or red meat for a year, or exercising whenever watching football). He decided to not just make this a family event, but turn it into a large-scale bet/competition amongst our friends. Going without sugar for year was apparently not enough of a challenge itself, so he added a few other stipulations to the bet, and convinced myself and six other adults to join in with us. The components of the bet are all outlined below (I do not necessarily promote this challenge in its entirety, I am just letting you know that my husband challenged us with).
- No added sweeteners, of any kind, in any of our food. This includes natural sugars (such as sugar, honey, molasses, etc…), and no artificial sweeteners (such as sucralose, aspartame, high fructose corn syrup, etc…). No sugar period. At all. We did have an orchestrated system for one freebie day per month, where we could eat sugar without penalty.
- No wheat products. We were not gluten-free, per se. It was actually wheat itself that was banned. The reason for this component of the bet was because of the insulin spike that can occur with consumption of wheat products (even whole wheat bread products).
- At least one hour of moderate-intensity exercise each day.
- At least seven hours of sleep each night (this was actually one of the hardest components of the bet for me to uphold).
We were starting the bet on May 1, 2014, and the plan was to go for an entire year.
Knowing that this would be a grand adventure, with many tough days ahead, we implemented several key techniques for change that would help us along on this journey.
Tips & Techniques for Successful Change
CONSCIOUSNESS RAISING
One of the most influential techniques to implementing change in your life is to “make the unconscious, conscious,” a theory developed by Sigmund Freud. This is applied to goal achievement in the sense it is important to educate yourself on the risks and benefits of both changing your behavior, and keeping your behavior the same. This is the time to learn more about the unhealthy behavior, and learn how changing it might benefit you.
My husband and I are a bit of research geeks. Being eternal students and researchers, we enjoy reading scientific articles and studying physiological pathways. To help us prepare for the bet that I mentioned above, we spent time learning more about insulin responses to various foods, the physiology behind sugar digestion, and effects that sugars can have in the body. We then would share that information with others who were participating in the bet, to help further their education as well.
Source: http://www.everydayhealth.com/columns/my-health-story/year-of-no-sugar-one-family-grand-adventure/
EMOTIONAL AROUSAL
This technique for change centers around building an emotional charge within us that will motivate us to make and sustain a change. Sometimes this can come in the form of a personal event, which is often viewed as fearful or traumatic. For the bet, my emotional arousal came in the form of my mom having recently been diagnosed with type II diabetes. My grandfather has also died from complications from diabetes. There is a distinct reality that diabetes may be in my future, and I would like to work hard to prevent it. This helped promote me to stick with the bet, and maintain my healthy behaviors.
Emotional arousal can also take the form of reading or watching passionate and emotionally charged commentaries and pseudo-documentaries (what I call documentaries that are biased and aimed to impact your emotions on the topic). There are several webinars and videos that are aimed at convincing you (through fear-based tactics) that sugar is very negative for your health, which we encountered during our research on the topic. Talking to others who have gone through similar changes can also aid in building emotional arousal.
HELPING RELATIONSHIPS
Many people will advise you that when you are implementing a change in your life, a good technique is to avoid doing it in isolation. Instead, make sure you have a good support network to hold you accountable. If friends and family members are checking in with you on a regular basis, asking how you are doing and if you are keeping to your plan, it is harder for you to fail at your goal.
During our bet, we created a Facebook page that was dedicated to supporting each other throughout the process (and maybe a little taunting was involved as well). Here we would share recipes, products, or ideas for ways to keep with the bet, and would also provide weekly check-ins where we would report on how we did the previous week (the bet/competition was point-based, with different amounts of points awarded for the different components of the bet).
ENVIRONMENTAL CONTROL
When implementing a change in your life, especially with the hopes of improving your health, don’t leave it up to your willpower to get you through. Instead, set yourself up for success by controlling the environment around you. Remove the cues and triggers that prompt the unhealthy behavior. Instead, surround yourself with reminders of how to maintain your healthy choices. This can include getting rid of items that tempt you, and posting notes of encouragement in key places to help remind you of your goals.
The weekend before our bet began, I went through every single item in our house to read the labels carefully and get rid of every item that contained any added sweeteners or any wheat products. Much to my children’s dismay, I was able to discard four large grocery bags of food (but my niece was glad to have many of those products). None of the foods were available in the house, so we could control our cravings better when we were hungry late at night. It also was nice to not have to read labels every time I went to cook or eat, knowing that all products in the house were bet-appropriate. NOTE: We did keep one shelf in our pantry for our kids that contained a few things like cereal and granola bars that did not meet the requirements of the bet.
I also taped my exercise plan for the week to our front door so that I would see it each time I walked out of the house. Utilizing technology, I also used several apps to help keep track and remind me of my workout plans.
COUNTERING
Part of having a good plan, is being ready for when your willpower starts to falter. Planning for these situations, and knowing how you will respond can help you get through the stressful times, or times when you would typically fall back into your old habits.
It is hard to meet the sweet craving that come when you quit eating sugars cold-turkey. Our bet did not exclude fruit, or other naturally sweet whole foods. Therefore, we planned to have plenty of fresh fruit available in our house for time periods when we were craving sweet treats. My husband really enjoys fruit, and may have gone a little overboard (as you can see below) with this plan.
TRACKING YOUR PROGRESS
Another solid technique for making successful changes in your life is to track your progress as you go. Before you start making changes, take measurements, write journal entries, and take pictures that will help remind you where you started during your journey. It is really hard to see change within yourself when you are making small changes on a daily basis. Instead, keep working on your goal, and reevaluate yourself after a month or two, to really see the changes.
To help me keep track, I used a couple of iPhone and internet applications to track my food consumption (www.myfitnesspal.com), and exercise (Endomondo). I also visited my doctor before the bet began to perform several blood tests (cholesterol, blood pressure, and glucose measurements, etc…), took “before” pictures, measured circumferences of various body parts, and weighed myself.
REWARDS
Rewarding yourself for your accomplishments is proven to be more effective than punishing yourself when you are not successful, when trying to make changes in your life. Some people will buy themselves a present as a reward for accomplishing a goal (e.g. Every time I work out, I will put $1 in a jar. After I have earned enough money by working out, I will buy myself a massage). External rewards, such as this example, often work well at the onset of working toward a goal. However, it would be best to eventually transition yourself toward internal rewards (e.g. Knowing that I am improving my health is reward enough.).
As part of our bet/competition, we paid $10/person each month. At the end of each quarter we would pay the winner half of those entry fees, and the other half was saved for the overall winner at the end of the year. We started with this external reward, but it quickly switched to an internal reward of feeling better and healthier by sticking to the bet (the day after cheat-days we would all feel extremely sick due to our sugar consumption).
Using the techniques outlined above has proven to lead to more success when trying to reach goals. Remember not to only leave it to your willpower, but set yourself up for success by using these techniques.
Now, some of you may be interested in how the bet panned out for us all. All eight of us were going pretty strong for the months of May and June (I actually start in mid-April). However, on the week of the Fourth of July, every single one of us fell off the wagon, and the bet was off. After three weeks, I decided to go back on the bet, as I truly did feel much better when following the parameters of the bet. I stayed on the bet for about 3-4 more weeks, trying desperately to convince others to join me again. However, no one (not even my husband) would come back on the bet with me. Since I wasn’t completely invested in every aspect of the bet, I decided to stop the bet, proper, and make up my own health plan, which still utilized many of same factors, but dismissed the ones I was not invested in.
I’m going to go ahead here, and call myself the overall winner of the bet. What do you think?
“The people with the best self-control, paradoxically, are the ones who use their willpower less often. Instead of fending off one urge after another, these people set up their lives to minimize temptations. They play offense, not defense, using their willpower in advance so that they avoid crises, conserve their energy and outsource as much self-control as they can.” – John Tierney, “Be It Resolved,” New York Times 1/5/12
Sources:
Changing For Good. Prochaska JO; Norcross JC; DiClemente CC. Harper Collins Publishers: 1994.
