With the New Year comes a natural boost of energy, and often a desire to make healthy lifestyle changes that last. If you want to make the most of this opportunity for change, then it can be especially helpful—and effective—to give yourself all the tools and training you need to succeed.
While the desire for healthy change is common this time of year, unfortunately, statistics show that all too often the follow-through comes up short. Throughout the United States, 39% of adults set annual goals, but only 36% of them make it past the first month with their new habits intact. Whether you are looking to lose weight or add muscle, why it’s so difficult can feel like something of a mystery.
Whether for learning a new skill or achieving a set goal, coaching is a time-honored tradition that’s proven to work. When taken in tandem with a dietary system like our doctor-developed protocol, you have everything necessary to burn fat, build muscle, and revitalize your personal health habits.
At Community Pharmacy, we aim to dispel uncertainty and make healthy living a clear path forward for anyone regardless of age, gender, or fitness level. If you contact our representatives today, then we can set up a health consultation to evaluate your current physical health level, discuss what you would like to change, and how best to achieve your goals.
Habit Stacking Leads to Success
While it’s easy to set a habit, actually following through is by far the more difficult part. Creating a new routine can feel strange and off at first, so it’s best to approach change with an intentional strategy in place that helps us build incrementally toward health goals.
Habit stacking is a wonderful tool to do just that. In essence, you add a desired behavior on top of one you already do regularly. For example, if your goal is to run a mile a day Monday through Friday, and you typically watch an hour of television in the evening, you’d layer the two on top of one another by setting a new rule such as, “Before I watch an hour of television, I will run a mile.”
This practice wires the two activities together in your mind, connecting the positive associations of one with the other, and making both far more likely to occur than just one.
Coaching can be particularly effective in setting up these systems as they evaluate your current habits and lifestyles, and can spot the areas of potential gain. We all have something of a blindspot when it comes to objectively viewing our habits, so an outside perspective is particularly effective here for those looking to enact change.
Along with helping set up new habit systems that lead to weight loss, coaches can be a powerful accountability tool that helps keep you on track toward your fitness goals in the long run.
Accountability is a Powerful Motivator
It’s easy to stay motivated in the early stages of fitness when we are eager and excited, but in the weeks and months that follow, exercise and dietary restrictions can start to feel stale and unsatisfying.
The risk of letting healthy new habits fall to the wayside can be mitigated by a coach who can help you stay accountable to your goals even when motivation levels are low. If your health system and weight loss plan are limited to just a few applications and yourself, it’s easier to skip days and let progress slip. Coaches bring structure to weight loss programs and provide the support and encouragement we all sometimes need to continue.
The positive effects of a coach aren’t just limited to motivation though, but also the feedback system that shows us the payoff of all our hard work.
Positive Feedback Fuels Growth
Human brains are hardwired to respond to feedback, and a major effect of having a personal coach is the feedback they provide. Coaches can help clients keep track of essential fitness data like calories consumed vs. burned, protein intake, weight fluctuation, and strength increase.
For those looking to lose weight, it’s no secret that limiting carbohydrate intake encourages the body to burn fat reserves at a faster rate. The ideal protein weight loss program helps clients track this data themselves, which adds an additional layer of relevant data to their health program.
With coaching and effective data tracking in place, it won’t take long to see results. Once you start to notice physical changes and see the direct correlation between your efforts and results, it’s far easier to continue with healthy habits. It might take weeks or months to hit lofty goals, but receiving earned positive feedback spurns the mind and body forward in a way unlike anything else.
Having a coach there who helped you start your journey from day one and was there for each little success and stumble adds an element to the system that’s difficult—if not impossible—to replicate by just exercising alone.
Once you see, feel, and know a coach’s system works, it’s far easier to continue with a program, even if it pushes you outside your comfort zone at times.
Making Change Requires the Right Tools
There’s nothing easy about weight loss, and every person might require a different set of tools to find success. Taking the time to find a coach whose methods and personality mesh well with your own is as—or perhaps more—important than any exercise equipment, gear, or support technology. Humans are social creatures by nature, and having someone by your side, and pushing you when you need it most, helps us push through discomfort and unlock a healthier mindset.
No coach or health program will magically shed the weight away, but they can make the path forward easier for us. We all need a little external support and encouragement sometimes to get over physical and mental humps, and coaches are trained experts who do just that for clients of all types.
If you are interested in evaluating your current health and setting new weight loss goals, then contact the Community Pharmacy team today. We can help identify your best health system fit and help you take the first steps towards a healthier lifestyle that lasts through this year and the next.
