How You Answered
The purpose of the first part of this questionnaire is to raise your awareness of certain issues or factors that can cause you stress. The second part is designed to highlight how you respond to specific events or situations.
Raising your level of regular physical activity – especially when it involves getting outside, as in the walking plan – has been shown to be a highly effective way to combat stress and limit depression. If your answers to the questionnaire highlighted several areas that could be improved, I’d encourage you to revisit the questionnaire after you have completed the six-week plan.
Breaking the cycle of emotional stress can be hard, but the number one message to remember is that exercise – specifically cardiovascular activity – is a powerful tamer of emotional stress. Your six-week walking plan will help you alleviate anxiety and depression and boost self-esteem. You will lose excess body fat and feel more confident. So not only are you going to look better, you will feel better too.
As well as exercising, allocating a little time for yourself to engage in some form of self-nurture that doesn’t involve food can have a positive impact on how you feel about yourself. You could, for example, take a class, read or relax in the bath …
3 Making it Happen – Changing Habits and Attitudes
Would you rather exercise for an hour a day – or be dead for 24 hours a day? Think about it…
If you are serious about losing weight and improving your health, you have to make some changes. Don’t panic – these don’t have to be drastic. However, these changes will essentially involve your existing habits and attitudes. At this stage in your life, your habits and attitudes will be well developed; you have had many years to put them into practice. Your habits may be so well grooved that they are a permanent feature of your life. They feel natural and you don’t give them much thought. For example, that mid-afternoon cup of tea and slice of cake or biscuit, your daily stroll with the dog, pint down the pub or G and T in the evening.
Evidence has shown that we tend to overestimate how physically active we are. As I explained in the Introduction, many of us believe we are physically active when in fact we are geographically or mentally active. You may need to rethink and readjust your habits. For instance, you may believe that your daily saunter with the dog is enough for your fitness. It’s not that everyday activities are ineffective: the Chief Medical Officer’s report, ‘Health of the Nation’, clearly stated that activities such as walking and gardening are sufficient to incur health benefits. The problem, however, is that they are often not vigorous enough to produce real health benefits, let alone weight loss.
In my research for this book, time and time again respondents believed they were ‘doing enough’ and that they were ‘physically active’. On closer examination, however, the intensity and progression needed to provide health improvements and weight loss were missing. Seventy per cent of the respondents said the changes they primarily sought were weight loss and health improvements. Despite putting in time and effort to improve their health, they didn’t achieve the results they sought. This lack of results creates a sense of frustration and an element of ‘what’s the use?’
So, on your six-week plan, you may need to develop some new habits and attitudes. The great news is that some of the core habits you need may already be in place, but just need a little tweaking.
Stop kidding yourself you are doing enough
and start making your actions count.
Your attitude can directly affect your health and ageing process, either positively or negatively. By adjusting your habits and educating your attitudes, the actions you take become not only achievable but also sustainable, making the whole ageing process a far more positive experience. Together, all your habits and attitudes can lead you to an achievable major change to your health, your weight and how you feel about yourself.
To help you understand how you can make your existing habits and attitudes work for you, we need to introduce the concept of ‘small steps for big change’, which is central to the success of the six-week plan. This means that all the small actions you take, when put together and done progressively, can lead to a big change in your health and weight.
So often, I see people who are committed to improving their health but their actions fail. This is because their expectations are too great, and the changes they are trying to put in place are too drastic, unrealistic and unachievable for them. The six-week plan is about achievability, and the small steps for big change concept will be crucial to your success.
The six-week plan is about achievability and taking small steps to make a big change.
A habit is a series of behaviours we have got used to doing in response to a specific cue. When trying to adopt a new, healthy regime, we can often come unstuck as we try to ditch too many habits too quickly, and implement new actions which bear no resemblance to our existing life. Such a large change can be daunting, difficult to maintain and often leads to us dropping all the good actions we need to take. Implementing new habits does involve some planning and thought, but the new habits I am going to ask you to develop need not be a world away from some of the ones you already have.
To help us make habit-changing an achievable process, we need to understand a little about how we form habits.
Habit-forming in the Brain
Understanding how the brain works provides us with an insight into our behaviour and how habits are formed. Here is a very simple overview of how habits are formed in the brain.
The brain is responsible for receiving, processing and sending out messages based on vast amounts of information. Message carriers called neurons need to travel to specific destinations in the brain so that the information can be acted upon. The message carriers