Understand the 6 steps to behaviour change and you can succeed this time around.
1. Precontemplation
2. Contemplation
3. Preparation
4. Action
5. Maintenance
6. Relapse
Recognise the natural process that takes place for you, as for others, when trying to make a behaviour change. In this instance, we are talking of the behaviour changes that will lead to weight-loss. Understand this ‘cycle of change’ and you will move into the driver’s seat of your own mind-set when it comes to dieting and weight-loss.
You will, undoubtedly, recognise yourself in the stages as I discuss them. You will, hopefully, also see that past ‘failures’ were simply part of the learning process. While they may have set you back, repeatedly; they have, in fact, positively influenced your chances of success this time around.
Once you understand this cycle and note that it generally takes people, perhaps three times around the cycle to succeed for good, you might take the pressure off yourself and enjoy the journey to your happy weight in a more productive and relaxed way in ‘23.
1. Precontemplation
Stage one is when you are happily eating all around you, ie its Christmas party season; Christmas time and left-over season. Words such as “I know I shouldn’t but” pass your lips, as the last of the toffees begin to look tempting. Guilt might be an ingredient to every morsel eaten, but you are in free-fall. This is “life is short” territory, “ may as well enjoy it”. What is often misunderstood in this phase, that I have heard clients detail so often, is that a simple change from an “all or nothing” mentality in the very moment, could stave off the many pounds that you may spend the first weeks in January trying to lose. But this is a natural phase, so do not beat yourself up about it. It was you. You are moving into a different phase right this very minute, as you read. You now realise you need to make some changes to get some different results in your body, your energy, your overall health.
2. Contemplation
This is a phase we can spend so much of our valuable time in. “I know I need to lose weight”. “I used to weight……”. “I should join a gym in the New Year”. “I really want to fit into my skinny jeans again”. “This is the year I will do it”. We want to make changes, but somehow we are stuck. Or we are awaiting some sort of inspiration. Or the time is not right, right now. Or, or, or. Is there ever an ideal time to apply yourself to some discipline and perceived hardship? That answer fades in enthusiasm as the years move on. Time passes anyway, would be the argument I have presented to my clients over the years. You may as well be working the programme as talking about it, in my opinion. Its going to be bikini season next June whether you do the work now or not! How do you wan to feel next summer?
3. Preparation
Ah, my most preferred stage. Why? Because this stage is revelatory to those who have never recognised it as a natural phase to go through in making a behavioural change. You think that just because you are having a “good” week (usually week one!) that your preparation game is on. NO. This is the MOST VITAL of all stages if you truly want to succeed in 2023. It needs to be on every one of the fifty-two weeks of this year! The good news is that it gets easier and easier and becomes, well, a way of life. Trust me here. This is a leap of faith perhaps at this stage; only experience will teach you this. Trust me for three short weeks and your habit will take over my role after that.
Preparation is always the most overlooked phase in my experience. We seem to expect our daily life to be full of surprises, so we fail to prepare for the usual eventualities that befall most of us, most days. In other words; you might get up at seven, shower, get ready, drop kids/teens, arrive at work (office or back at home) and dive into your day of emails, meetings, phone calls, patient or client work /etc. Have you stopped to have breakfast? Has it been prioritised? Are you expecting it to be magically delivered, just how you like it, to your desk/shop/factory floor? I don’t think so. NO. Instead, someone offers to get you a cappuccino and a danish at 10.30 and as you are STARVED, you say “yes” and think …….“Oh no”.
This becomes a simple and very commonly occurring ‘lapse’ (more on this in a minute) but does not need to dropkick you back into precontemplation, where you may as well be “hung for a sheep as a lamb”!!
Instead, this time around the cycle of change; prepare. You know the saying “fail to prepare, prepare to fail”? Irritating as that is to hear, it is extremely accurate.
What if you had soaked some overnight oats? How many seconds would that have taken you? No crazy concoction necessary (unless it’s week one & you fancy it & you have time on your hands & you could be bothered). Find a container (job done once) and follow my super-simple recipe below. Then seal it and sit it at the very front of your fridge (so that you SEE it in the morning).
By all means, jazz this recipe up as you like, but make it the night before, every single night before you go to bed. Of course, porridge works beautifully here too; put your scoop of oats, milk and blueberries into a microwave-proof container and microwave at work the following morning, as say 8.30am. YUM!
Because you prepared, you are somehow magically immune to the coffee and danish run and it does not call to you in any emotional way.
Of course there are more meals to the day than breakfast. But it all begins with the grocery list. I am dead serious! If you do not have a decent list, you will pick up whatever falls into your shopping trolley. Make a list. Stick to it. Shop when you are not rushed. Shop when you are not hungry. Shop when you are alone. You know this stuff by mid-life!!
Prioritise preparation. Prepare your thoughts for the week ahead (10 mins on a Saturday). Make a simple meal plan. Repeat it the next week. Who cares if its not a gourmet feast every day. It will keep you away from fast-food. Bring lunch to work as necessary. Make dinner enough on a Sunday to have on a busy Tuesday. Alter as you go but keep it as simple as you wish. By mid-life you are wise enough to know that not every evening sees you in the mood to peel, slice, cook, vary. Some evenings you need to eat some delicious left-overs. ON PURPOSE.
My Simplest Overnight Oats - to complicate as you see fit & vary as you like!
½ cup of rolled-oats
½ cup of low-fat milk
½ cup of frozen blueberries
1 dessertspoonful of good quality granola
2 dessertspoonful of vanilla flavoured high-protein / Greek yoghurt
The night before; Layer the oats and milk at the bottom of a re-usable tub (a jam jar works beautifully here). Add the blueberries, yoghurt and granola.
In the morning, mix to eat.
Soup for lunch……this is not the season for salad……..
Carrot & Coriander/Cilantro Soup
Ingredients
500g carrots/1lb carrots, peeled & chopped
I small onion, peeled & chopped
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 litre boiling water
1 vegetable stock cube
I small bunch of coriander/cilantro to taste, chopped
Method
Heat a large pan, add the olive oil and cook the onions for approximately five minutes, with the lid on. Add the carrots and the stock cube and stir. Immediately add the boiling water, bring to the boil and allow to simmer for twenty minutes, until the carrots are very soft. Finally, add the coriander and blitz with a hand-held blender. This soup is sweet and savoury, lovely and light. There is enough here to last all week. Trust me when I tell you that you will be happy to see it every day! Serve with a small slice of good quality whole-wheat bread and some feta or tuna mayonnaise.
4. Action
And now for the part you all expected to dive straight into – ACTION! You may be there already. If so, well done you. From today, add preparation to your action and you will get the results you seek, because you will set yourself up for sustainable success. When preparation precedes action you have the recipe for success, rather than for the annual, short-lived, surge of January enthusiasm. Suddenly, you have moved from the endless ‘dieting cycle’ to a healthier way of eating. Now, this is the stuff of real behaviour change.
Action is the phase where we depend on willpower. We know what to do by the time menopause hits. And I will detail my approach over the coming weeks, that I have used to help countless women at middle age. Action is the stuff of saying “NO”. “NO” to nights out on the town (just for three weeks). “NO” to sumptuous lunches or cheap fast-food treats. “NO” to eating the last of anything left-over from Christmas. “NO” to treat weekends-away that include afternoon tea (an unnecessary calorie-laden bombshell wedged in between lunch and dinner – like we need that right now!). “NO” to every other excuse you have ever used to start you diet next week!!
While discipline, willpower, accuracy tend to last a week or two (at best); this year, with preparation adhered rigidly to, you can make it past three weeks and bingo – you have the bones of a new habit formed. A behaviour change is in your sights. You are on the horse. NOW AL YOU HAVE TO DO IS STAY ON!
5. Maintenance
After some time (possibly up to six months) you no longer have to actively maintain the changes to your behaviours around food, exercise, shopping, drinking, moving. Because you have put in a consistent (not perfect, necessarily) effort, the payoff becomes that the effort turns, ever so gradually, to your new norm. “It’s just what I do now”, I have been told so often. It gets easier and easier. The more you trust in yourself, the more trustworthy you become. You wouldn’t leave home without your breakfast. You wouldn’t leave home without your lunch. You wouldn’t dream of having no food in the house. You wouldn’t miss a day’s exercise or movement.
Your new behaviours in January have become your new habits by February and the new ‘you’ by June. When you understand this, you can finally see the light at the end of the weight-loss tunnel.
Now you understand why I don’t want you weighing yourself every day in January – it’s too much negative energy and too much of a distraction form your behaviour-change goals. It’s your behaviours you want to change. STOP, today, reinforcing the old habits that have left you down so often. Try a different approach this year. Trust in it. Let the results be a very pleasant surprise…..in your clothes. And if necessary to your sanity, you can dig-up the weighing scales from where you buried it in the back garden and dust it down in February, once your habits are beginning to solidify. NOT BEFORE THEN.
6. Relapse
In the real world, which I inhabit for the most part, we fall off the bandwagon; we “fail”; we lapse, on occasion. This is NO BIG DEAL. Understand that this is a normal, expected stage in making any successful behaviour change. The great news here is, that, because it is expected, we can remedy it. How? By being prepared!
Fail to prepare, prepare to fail! Okay, so you fell into the bottom of the box of chocolates that someone accidentally left open on the coffee table in front of the tv. It happens. You consumed 100g of chocolate. You added 500kcal to your day that was totally unaccounted for. HELP! What do you do now?
Well, as I see it (and have seen it more often that I can count) you have two choices; you can, one; eat another 500kcal worth, that you don’t even like that much and then dig out the unopened pringles, baileys and whipped cream (so that a 500 kcal excess becomes a 3,500kcal excess). Or, two; with your newfound understanding of the psychology of making a behaviour change, you recognise this as a ‘lapse’; not a full-blown ‘relapse’ and you go to bed with a glass of water and no guilty feeling. The following morning you get up and replicate the good habits of the day before, ideally with an additional twenty minutes of exercise added in , in order to eat into the glycogen stored-up since the last evening’s sugar hit. That’s it. You are on the horse and you are staying on! So you hit a bump in the road. So what! It was a once-off. END OF.
The more frequent reaction is to go into full binge-mode. Do, as I exaggerate here (not by much, mind) and your 3,500kcal is, in scientific terms, one pound of fat gained. It’s that easy, sadly. Because you are used to starting again the next Monday, you can do some serious calorie-damage for the remainder of the weekend. A week’s work can be gone and your motivation to get back into action wanes. You’ve been here before.
Instead, allow for occasional lapses. Recognise them when they happen. They will become less scary and as a result, much less frequent. You can get right back into action. Never overlook the importance of preparation though, as this is the bedrock of success in my experience.
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