To kick off New Year, New You Month, Prescribe FIT recognizes the second day of January as “Start Your Healthy Lifestyle Day.” This article will help you get started and stay on track towards transforming your lifestyle this year.
Start your Healthy Lifestyle Day
Have you made a New Year’s resolution yet? Some of the most popular resolutions are to eat better, exercise more, and/or lose weight.
All these goals play a significant role in a healthy lifestyle, so Prescribe FIT created “Start Your Healthy Lifestyle Day” to encompass each of these goals and help you achieve them!
It might be a tall order to start a resolution on New Year’s Day – and that’s okay! There’s no harm in waiting an extra day.
As we mentioned in our Moderation Month article , celebrating the holidays with family and friends is just as important for your health as nutrition and physical fitness.
So, don’t feel rushed to start working towards your wellness goals while you’re still trying to enjoy the holidays.
That said, if we want to succeed, we have to start somewhere! January 2nd is a great day to really focus on implementing your New Year’s resolution.
What is a healthy lifestyle?
Prescribe FIT defines a healthy lifestyle as the following:
“The commitment in mindset and practice to a balanced way of living which includes consistent habits that promote personal wellbeing and fulfillment in all domains of life and that proactively reduce the risk of illness, pain, or hardship.”
In other words, living a healthy lifestyle means making simple yet consistent changes to your nutrition, physical activity, and day-to-day life that promote good health.
For example, taking the stairs instead of the elevator or pausing once a day to practice mindfulness.
How to start living a healthy lifestyle
Whatever resolution you choose, the idea is that you start with a small change and commit to it for life, not just for a few weeks.
As you add more and more simple changes, their effects will compound over time, giving way to powerful results.
It’s true that committing to a long-term lifestyle transformation can be easier said than done.
While a habit is formed in as few as 21 days, it can take as many as one to two years of consistently practicing those habits for your new lifestyle to take shape.
The key is to start slow and steady, focusing on the easiest changes you can make to improve your health.
Importantly, those changes are different for everyone, so seeking guidance from your Care Coordinator or health care provider is a great place to start.
Soon enough, those easy changes will become a healthy lifestyle!
3 Tips for Success
While you can start making changes to cultivate a healthy lifestyle at any time, New Year’s is a great place to start.
If your resolution this year involves a healthy lifestyle change, below are several more tips to boost your odds of long-term success, according to science.
1. Define your goals in terms of achieving positive outcomes, rather than avoiding negative outcomes.
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- For example, instead of setting the goal to “Quit smoking” i.e., avoiding the negative outcome of smoking, it’s better to focus on a goal such as “I will chew gum each time I want to smoke.”
2. Seek social support to help keep you accountable towards your goals.
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- For example, involve your friends and/or family in your plans to achieve a healthy lifestyle and ask them to check in on your progress regularly.
3. Utilize the “fresh start effect.”
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- This is the tendency to make changes to your habits on a significant date such as the New Year or a new semester. You can use this to boost your motivation periodically throughout the year, such as by thinking of the first of each month as a “refreshed start” towards achieving your resolution.
Conclusion
Prescribe FIT established Start Your Healthy Lifestyle Day to help patients succeed with their New Year’s Resolutions, ultimately turning them into habits that they practice for life. To learn more about Prescribe FIT, visit us at https://www.prescribefit.com/.
Published on December 26, 2023
