No Motivation To Change Your Lifestyle? - This Could Be Why....

So you feel so good when you get 8 hours' of sleep... yet when it comes to 11pm and you are busy watching that Netflix show, you just want to keep watching and before you know it, it is 1am. This means that you will only get 6 hours of sleep that night.

Or maybe you know that you feel amazing when you eat healthy and nourishing meals. You feel vibrant and energetic and it feels good to know that you are taking care of your health and your body. However, every evening as you go to prepare a nourishing meal, the temptation to order a take-away just feels too strong. Even though you know that you won't really even enjoy it that much, you still make the choice that you don't really want to make for yourself and your health.

Or perhaps you are someone that just knows how good movement is for your mental wellbeing. Every time you go to that dance class or yoga class, you feel amazing. Yet whenever the time for the class rolls around, you just don't feel motivated to put your exercise gear on and go to the class. Staying at home just seems so much easier.

DO ANY OF THESE SOUND FAMILIAR? Why is it so difficult to make changes to our lifestyle? The reason often is because there is no urgency to make the change - so it is very easy to post-pone making those changes to "tomorrow" or "Monday"....

A lot of people will FINALLY make the changes to their lifestyle and diet that they want to make when they reach a crisis point. Usually it is only when someone gets a diagnosis of diabetes or pre-diabetes, sees some scary blood test results or gets really unwell, that they feel the strong pull, drive and motivation to change. You see, for many people, the vague motivation to improve their health in the long-term (especially if. nothing is really that wrong with their health right now), is not a strong enough motivation to make an immediate change. Of course, maybe someone will still want to change and to look after their health, but they can always postpone this decision and these choices until "tomorrow" or "next week" because there really is no urgency to make the changes right NOW.

So if you want to make changes to your health and lifestyle but don't have any diagnosis or blood tests that are giving you that sense of urgency to make the changes that you want to make - what can you do? IT CAN HELP TO CREATE YOUR OWN SENSE OF URGENCY. Getting really clear on short-term and long-term benefits of making the changes that you want to make can be helpful but also getting really clear on short-term and long-term what would happen if you don't change anything, can also be a strong source of motivation. The more you can find short-term drivers for making the changes that you want to make, the more likely you are to make those changes.

For example, let's say that you want to start going to the gym more frequently but the idea of going to the gym so that you are healthy in 15 years' time just isn't motivating. If instead, when you imagine going to the gym, you think of the short-term benefits you will get from doing so: that you will feel amazing after the work-out, that you get some alone-time to relax, that you will be able to listen to a podcast or some music - perhaps this would be more motivation for you to go. Or perhaps if you focused on what would happen if you never went to the gym e.g. you would lose strength and muscle mass or you would continue to not feel great - again this can serve as motivation.

Whilst a diagnosis can often scare you into making changes in your life, what we want to create is a big enough WHY for you to feel motivated to make changes before things get really bad. Thinking through your big WHY and ideally making this both short-term and long-term too, can really help you to find the motivation that you need to make changes in your life. Often people don't make changes to their lifestyle because there is no urgency to do so - but by creating this sense of urgency themselves, this can really help propel them to make the changes that they want to make.

If you would like some support to make changes to your lifestyle, please get in touch with me at info@thefoodtherapyclinic.com.

"The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new." —Socrates