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5 ways to make lifestyle changes stick

There’s no question about it—ditching bad habits and adopting good ones can be challenging. The key is setting yourself up for success. Read on for tried-and-true strategies for lasting change.

By Jaclyn Law

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1. Find your motivation

We all have goals, whether it’s exercising more or improving our diet. The important thing is figuring out why we want these things. “It takes a little bit of soul-searching,” says Robin Anderson, a registered dietitian at Revive Wellness Inc. in Edmonton. “I get people to look at the bigger picture: If you were to change your lifestyle, what would it look like? What’s important to you? Change is hard. There’s got to be something in it for people, otherwise we just get busy and we don’t do it.”

It’s also critical to find your own reasons for change, not your spouse’s or your doctor’s. “If you’re doing it because you should, not because you want to, the chances of success aren’t that great,” says Anderson.

2 Comments

I like that these are simple, elegant, timely. You need to be ready for this for it to work, though. Because for most of my life, I have been a person who eats to cover emotional distress, and I thought if I was fat I wouldn't be as quickly noticed (and therefore abused,) I needed my fat to protect me. For me, now, my goals work differently. I never check the scale or count calories, because if I do, I start to eat (badly). I'm eating to lower my cholesterol so that I make it to 40 yrs old without type 2 Diabetes or Heart Disease, Heart Disease being the number 1 in Saskatchewan. Think on that the next time you eat processed sugar or processed food with too much salt as a preservative...thx.

Submitted by S. on Thu, 2010-08-26 5:14pm.

Submitted by 15 on Wed, 2010-08-25 8:05pm.