3 Ways to Achieve Your Health Goals

For many of us, achieving and maintaining a healthy lifestyle is demanding. While we may need more exercise, healthier meals and clearer beverages, these goals are often unsustainable.

See how people around the world are making small changes to make it a habit and boost their health.

1. Test your goal for a week

Person: Corporate author, comedian and humourist, Andrew Tarvin.

Problem: Tarvin struggled to wake up early, with the general goal to become an early riser, but he was lacking the motivation he needed.

Small change: He set the goal timeframe to a week and placed the alarm clock on the other side of the room.

Big impact: He now wakes up every day at 6am, creating a lifestyle out of his goal.

2. Make it challenging to fail your goal

Person: UK telegraph journalist, Nicole Mowbray.

Problem: Mowbray wanted to become a vegetarian after researching the meat industry but found the idea of cutting meat out of her diet difficult to process.

Small change: She made a small change first, only eating free-range organic meat. Since it was harder to find, she ate less meat. The less she ate, the easier it became to be a vegetarian.

Big Impact: She transitioned to removing meat from her diet and now leads a vegetarian lifestyle.

3. Treat yourself how you treat loved ones

Person: Huffington Post Social Media Editor, Sarah Bourassa

Problem: Bourassa found a little voice always spoke negatively to her, causing her to worry excessively.

Small change: For one month, Bourassa started to talk to herself like she spoke to loved ones.

Big Impact: She improved her mental health by challenging the negative thoughts. She became more calm, focused and balanced. She also became more aware when other people spoke negatively about themselves.

You can easily set the goal of becoming healthier, but how are you going to achieve it? Review what area you want to improve, such as eating well, drinking less, exercising more, and figure out small changes you can make to achieve the goal. Strategies might include reducing portion sizes by a smidgen, drinking water in between alcoholic beverages, and parking your car a few metres away from where you normally do.

Get the ball rolling with a small change to boost your health and you will find it becomes a stepping stone to reaching a broader goal.