baby steps to a better you!

As I was considering venturing into blogging, I was thinking about how I can best use this platform to help others. I decided a good start would be to offer simple encouragement and advice for achieving a better, healthier you based on my own experiences and lessons learned over many years.

The most important thing to remember is that small, incremental steps in the right direction make the biggest difference. If you take a giant leap, you are so much more likely to fall. I have learned this first hand – the hard way!

Most people are aware of and try to avoid the “really bad things” known to be harmful to our bodies – smoking, excessive drinking, overeating, and such. While many manage to avoid these commonly known bad habits, they don’t realize that there are more subtle things that impact us as well – some positive, some negative. The idea is to remove what is damaging and add what is helpful, but don’t try to do it all at once.

This is especially relevant this time of year. With the holidays behind us, maybe we have a few extra pounds around the middle or picked up a new less than ideal habit. We face the new year with renewed motivation toward better, healthier living. That’s a good thing. The problem occurs when we jump head first into the latest fad diets, exercise programs, or other self-improvement strategies. So many people make this mistake. They go great guns, poised to make radical changes, and then, BAM! … they fall off the wagon! Simply put, this kind of approach almost always sets people up for failure. If you can do it and stick with it, more power to you, but most people can’t.

I know this to be true because I have set myself up for failure in this way many times. For example, there was the time I bought an exercise bike that quickly became a place for me to drape clothing and something to stub my toe on in the middle of the night. Ouch! Then there was another time when I was on a quest to eat healthier, so I planted my first garden. It was so huge that I never had enough time to tend to it. My neighbor finally came over mid-summer and asked if he could plow it under because snakes were becoming an issue in our little cul-de-sac. There was also the year my husband and I decided to switch to a low carb diet to lose weight. Just a couple of months into it, he became very ill. Sure, we lost a few pounds, but come to find out, my poor husband was highly allergic to many of the foods we were eating! So, even if your intentions are good, be careful what you set yourself up for. Do your research and take small steps. There’s a reason they say, “Look before you leap!”

After a few of these unfruitful experiences, I learned that making little adjustments over a longer period of time is much easier and tends to make the end goal more attainable. I’ll never forget one of my first successful small changes. I had put on a little extra weight and decided to do something about it. I was working in the corporate world at the time. My routine was to drop my children off at daycare and stop and buy a large caramel-flavored coffee with whipped cream and the works! I drank this high calorie, sugar-laden concoction every week day on the long commute to my office. Then on Saturdays, my husband would watch the kids while I went out to run household errands. Again, I would grab my favorite coffee drink to enjoy while I was shopping. I was drinking one of these six days a week!

So, one day after looking at the unwanted number on my scale, I decided to stop purchasing that coffee drink. Now, mind you, I didn’t stop drinking coffee altogether. I just made a small change, a baby step in the direction of my goal. I set up my home coffee maker the night before and started it the next morning. I made myself a smaller cup of coffee with just a tiny bit of sugar and a splash of cream and sipped it on my way to work. It took a couple of weeks of doing this every day to adjust, and I sure did miss that giant coffee with the rich caramel and whipped cream, but then I started to notice the pounds coming off. Not only that, but it was also making a positive difference in my wallet! That was over 16 years ago, and I still just have my one small cup of no frills coffee daily.

The advice I now give to anyone who will listen is to pick a small change and encourage yourself to stick with it until it becomes habitual. Once that first small change becomes a part of your normal routine, then make another one, and then another one, and so on. Sometimes the change is eliminating something bad, and other times it will be adding something good. Sometimes it’s an exchange – trading a harmful thing for a healthier thing. Eventually, you will have made a lot of improvements.

I stress this approach because it works, but also because when you set yourself up for failure, you also have a tendency to have negative thoughts and lose self-confidence. When you set yourself up for success, you have more positive thoughts and a sense of accomplishment from which you will gain self-confidence. A successful, confident person is a happier, healthier person all around.

My personal journey with lifestyle changes started almost 20 years ago. In the beginning I was most concerned about what I was putting into my body (food), and I focused most of my attention and education on making dietary changes. After a few failures early on, I learned my lesson, and started taking one baby step at a time. I successfully converted myself and my family to healthier foods and eating habits. As time went on, I started looking at other ways to improve and sustain our health. I began learning about the harmful effects of chemicals and other ingredients used in commercial skincare products being absorbed through our skin. So, I started incrementally eliminating those products, and eventually replacing them with my own safe and natural homemade alternatives. All of these accomplishments were good for me and my family physically, but I also came to realize how much they also contributed to my personal emotional well-being. It made me happy and confident to have been able to succeed in making these positive changes for myself and my family. And now, I am in a position to share what I have learned with others, and provide products and insights that can help people along their journey toward better health and wellness.

Stay tuned to my Hippie Chick Chatter blog for more positive thoughts, lots of encouragement, and lessons learned through my own mistakes.