How Your Friends Make It Easy to Be Healthy & Stress Free
This is a diary of the healthy lifestyle goals that my son, Chris, and I are making together each month. Since it takes 21-30 days to develop a new habit, making a goal for the month ahead is an effective strategy.
The buddy system is one of the main ways to get motivated. I’ve always found that if I say out loud to someone what I plan on doing, I’m more likely to do it. Because if I say I will, I feel responsible to follow through.
Age doesn’t matter. It’s never too late. You can always make progress and even reverse the signs of aging!
In an attempt to alleviate stress, Chris’s goal last month was to start taking Olly Goodbye Stress supplements, exercise as much as possible, add yoga to his exercise routine, and get away for mini vacations on weekends.
My goal last month was to use my pedometer to measure my walks. I also wanted to experiment with Health for iPhone by carrying my phone in my purse, a hip pouch or maybe even an armband…and still finish up the summer with weekly outdoor swimming.
Here’s how we did:
My Goal: Use A Pedometer, Experiment with Health for iPhone, and Swim
Getting in enough swimming was easier than usual this summer because of the weather. I did find, though, that I had to grab the chance when it came and not let anything get in the way. That realization formed because a few times I waited for someone else to go swimming with me and then lost the whole week due to changes in the weather. The weather men and women couldn’t seem to stay with one prediction; it kept changing hour to hour and day to day.
With the fall equinox, suddenly the weather went from hot to cool. Swimming was over. The first day of fall I was lucky to go to my sister Cathy’s new house at Lake St. Clair and go kayaking with her. We kayaked for hours. It’s great upper body exercise!
Cathy and I plan on more outdoor excursions, but my go-to exercise during the fall and spring is walking, hiking and jogging. There is a park full of trees with a walking trail near my house where I can easily go three times a week to walk and jog. It’s beautiful under the trees. I have always loved trees, woods and forests. It’s very peaceful.
In fact, I love to get my exercise outdoors any time of year. Summer is for swimming. Fall and spring is for walking, hiking and biking. Winter is for skiing, downhill or cross country. In recent winters due to less time, money and partners to go with, I unfortunately got most of my exercise shoveling snow instead of skiing.
When I started walking for exercise again, the battery on my pedometer went dead. It took awhile to find the right battery. My husband finally found some and bought them for me. Then I forgot to take the pedometer with me the first time I went out walking.
So I resorted to Health for iPhone, since I always have my cell phone with me. I usually left it in my purse, which actually worked. I synced it to My Fitness Pal, but I have never seen it connect up. It’s too much of a hassle to set up, in my opinion.
So I have just been calculating my walks by converting steps to how much time it generally takes. (My Fitness Pal requires inputting the time spent on walking at various speeds, not the steps.)
Since I use My Fitness Pal, I am concluding that I should just input the time and rate of walking and leave it at that. It’s not precise because it doesn’t count the entire day, but it’s the easiest. (As you probably do too, I walk around a lot and go up and down stairs often every day.)
For the next month, I am going to try improving my choice of foods. I love carbs and allow myself a glass of wine or beer and a sweet treat every day. I tried cutting those out in the beginning, but gradually went right back to it(!) Next, I’m going to concentrate on increasing fruits, vegetables and proteins. I’ll try to include some in every meal.
Chris’s Goal: Take Supplements, Increase Exercise, Add Yoga and Take Mini Vacations
This is an ambitious list of goals for one month, don’t you agree? (He probably got it from his mom…) No wonder Chris was feeling stressed. 😉
At this time, Chris got a new job as a representative for a craft beer distributor in New York, which threw him off his health goals to some extent. He never bought the Goodbye Stress supplements and he didn’t do yoga, but he did get to the gym once or twice a week and he got out of town the first two weekends of the month.
The first weekend, he went to the beach on Coney Island. The second weekend, he went camping in the woods in upstate New York. He had a wonderful time and loved getting out of town to unwind.
Getting to the gym once or twice a week is only half of what Chris had been doing before, and he really wanted to go more like five days a week. But he had to put extra time and energy into starting his new job. And although he has a car for this job, he actually found himself ending up walking all over town more than he had before. Looking back, he said he walked ten or eleven miles in one day. One day he looked at his iPhone and discovered he had walked about 30,000 steps. So he often ended up too tired to go to the gym after work.
Now that he has established himself in his new job, he wants to try to find ways to get to the gym three or four days a week again. That’s his new goal for the next month.
THE TAKEAWAY:
New goals may be the same as goals you had reached before, because things change. When we get knocked back on goals we had reached before, it is sometimes necessary to try to get back on track again. Also, remember when you are disappointed in reaching a goal you had in mind, there may be gains you have made without even realizing it (i.e., the increased walking exercise Chris was getting that decreased his gym time.)
Do you have any health goals? Do you have a buddy system? Let us know in the comments below!
Like this post? You might also like to read other entries in my Health Goal Diary here.
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