Healthy Weight for Life: The 5 stages of lifestyle change by Michael Hallinan

3. Preparation: Next week you’re going to skip that pizza. You found out the local Y has a pool and their family rates are affordable. You talked to your friend about doing more walks sometime.

4. Action: Two weeks and no pizza. You joined the Y and you’ve swum laps there a couple times. You and your friend have gone walking the past three Saturday mornings.

5. Maintenance: The weekly pizza has been a thing of the past for six months. Swimming is so much a part of your daily routine that you don’t feel right if you skip it. Those Saturday walks are don’t-miss tradition.

In fact, this readiness to change model is behavior-specific. That is, you might be in the action stage with the pizza but still in precontemplation on that exercise stuff. You’re not likely to be very successful if you flog yourself for not swimming laps every day, what you want to do is move yourself to the next stage: List the pros and cons of regular exercise and guess what, you’re thinking about it and that means contemplation.

So think about the behaviors you can change to lose weight. What stage are you in for each of those behaviors? In each case, what can you do to move yourself to the next stage? What are you most ready to change.

We explore readiness to change in my free teleclass, “The Real Skinny on Weight Loss: Don’t Diet, Do It.” You can get details and register at www.teleclassinternational.com/catalog.phtml?keywords=MH-RS

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BIO:

Michael Hallinan overcame a lifelong obesity, and the midlife discovery of health and fitness so changed his life that he established a coaching practice specializing in helping others find their own healthy way to a healthy weight. For more helpful tips, subscribe to the Healthy Weight Newsletter. For past issues and to subscribe see
www.healthyweightcoaching.com/Ezine.htm

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