New Year. The time where promises are made and resolutions are engineered. We all want to shed the wears and worries of the last 12 months and start afresh with bold intentions, usually of weight loss and good habits. Great! But first let’s have a quick sanity check; is this what you promised yourself last year? And dare I say it, the year before that? Well let’s get one thing clear straight away (and coming from a master fitness coach this may shock you):
save your time, money and effort and ditch the temptation to enrol in the gym, forget buying in slimming foods you don’t even like and stop thinking big!
When it comes to changing your body shape, long-term success - the kind of success that brings about an entire lifestyle shift - can’t be ‘fixed’ with a drastic New Year diet or fitness plan. The real life-changers, they come from the small things; the ‘One-Percents’. If you really want to get in shape for this year, and for many years to come, then get your ‘One-Percenters’ sorted! How you do that is easy, it just takes a little bit of thought (which is free… and much cheaper than the gym)!
Your ‘One-Percenters’ need to come from the fundamental area you want to change, so for weight loss these will be food and exercise (the mind-set shift is taken care of by simply following this concept!). Ask yourself, ‘what one thing can I change right now about what I eat and how I exercise’? These will be your One-Percenters. Nothing big, just a small tweak that is easily practised; it could be having a glass of water before your evening meal, or doing 5 squats while you clean your teeth in the morning. These aren’t drastic commitments, these are easy. But guess what, by the end of the 7 days you would have had over a litre more water that you normally would drink, and completed 35 more bum toning squats that you would have done the week before. Multiply that over the month and you are already making huge changes; think small, win big!
We often fool ourselves into thinking we have to be drastic to see change, and if you want instant results then fine, but quick fixes are rarely sustainable and all that effort can be tiresome and difficult to maintain, let alone expensive.
By changing a few One-Percents each week you will find change happens more naturally, and this means long-term success.
So how about this year you leave the big and bold intentions behind, find your One-Percents and embrace your transition to a better, fitter you; and this time next year your New Year’s Resolution can be more about fun than fitness (not to mention by then you’d have around 1800 squats behind you… perky)!