A healthy lifestyle does not become part of our life in an instant. It is a series of choices we make every day consciously and continuously. Initially, the changes of opting a healthy lifestyle and undertaking wellness activities are difficult, but if we persist, it becomes a part of our new healthy behaviour. Therefore, it is important that healthy lifestyle activities are adopted as part of our life from early childhood and adolescent period itself. This helps to prevent or reverse the adverse effects of lifestyle disorders such as, poor eating habits and physical inactivity.
In order to maintain health goals we can try the following strategies:
Set positive health goals: Having positive health goals keeps us motivated to follow goals with energy and enthusiasm. For example, a student may decide, ‘I will skip dinner daily’. This is a determination with a negative mind. This type of goal does not train our mind for healthy lifestyle. Instead, the goal could be, ‘I will eat healthy food’. This helps to make healthy food choices. Similarly, one can decide, “I will firmly say ‘NO’ to Tobacco use”. Such goals help us to reinforce positive behaviours in the long term.
Set realistic goals: You would agree that many times we set health goals but fail to achieve them. For example, we may decide to exercise at least five days a week. But we have not been able to do so for about two weeks now. Gradually we lose track of our goal and we feel that now it’s difficult to exercise. We slip into the attitude of either we follow it every day or none. This is because we give up as we have not been able to exercise for five days due to lack of time. In such situations, we should not feel guilty of failure. Rather we should re-visit and re-plan our goals related to regular physical activity or playing games, considering the real situations in our life.
