craft your plan
healthy habits
click to download the word or excel guide & get started!
(1) Define
the Goal
Specific goals mean specific results. Without knowing what we are aiming for, finding useful interventions and strategies becomes unnecessarily difficult. Not sure where to start? Here are our guiding principles for a healthy lifestyle that could get you started
- Eat more protein daily (1 g of protein per pound of your goal body weight is a simple and effective target)
- Eating 8 servings of fruits and/or vegetables per day
- Eating 25-38 g of fibre per day (25 for women, 38 for men on average)
- Cooking X meals from scratch each week (where X is your personal goal)
- Drinking 2-3 L of water per day
- Sleeping 8 hours per night
- Walking 30 minutes per day
- Resistance training 2-3x per week
Let’s come up with specific measures of success for you and your goal. This will be highly dependent on your goals and progression, but try to narrow it down to a simple scale or YES/NO answer. Let’s walk through an example of someone looking to eat more vegetables each day. This person’s goal is to eat vegetables at each meal. They make a scoring system from 0-3 corresponding to how many of their meals had vegetables that day. If they had 2 meals with veggies on Tuesday, they would give that day a 2 /3 score. Try to come up with a simple system that makes sense for your goals. As always, remember to be realistic! If you are starting with no vegetables on an average day, adding vegetables to one meal could be a great place to start.
Let’s keep this simple to start. On the next page you will find a calendar to help you track your goals. Print it out, put it on your fridge or somewhere you will review it every day, and set an alarm to complete it daily. Use your definition of success and give yourself a score for each day.
The amount of time it takes for a habit to stick is different for everyone. We suggest starting with 1 month and then reflect on your journey. Is this new behavior easily integrated into your life now? Or is it still something that you need to put conscious effort into implementing? If not, try another month of tracking.
(2) Understand your why
Changing your behaviors and taking on new challenges is difficult by definition. You will run into obstacles along the way and struggle through moments when you want to give up. In order to overcome these moments and be successful, it’s crucial to clearly identify and understand your “Why.” We are looking for you to go deep into the reason behind your goal- the deeper and more emotional you can get, the better. “Because I want to be healthier,” won’t cut it here! Why does your health matter to you? What prompted this change? Take a few moments and reflect on why this goal is important, how it will make you feel once you reach it and who else’s life it will impact.
So, why now? Why didn’t you try last year or even last month to reach this goal? If you did, why do you think you were unsuccessful? What is going to be different this time?
(3) Strategies, Behaviors, and Tools
Long term change stems from (1) identifying the behaviors that led us to this point and (2) altering them in sustainable ways. Believe it or not, less is more here and adding in new habits can be more successful than trying to completely eliminate old habits. There are countless behavior change strategies that could help you reach your goal, but here are a few common ones to get you started based on your goal.
- Plan meals and snacks ahead of time, typically at the beginning of the week – extra points if you can involve the rest of your family or housemates
- Create a list of easy to prepare snacks that you will actually eat & enjoy
- Prepare meals ahead of time and packing leftovers into accessible, portioned containers
- Create your own template for a Balanced Plate or use this one from Canada’s Food Guide
- Intentionally seek out new fruits and vegetables that you haven’t before (maybe one new type each week or grocery trip)
- Set aside time to prepare your meals ahead of time. Make sure to make enough so you can have leftovers and pack them into accessible, portioned containers
- Create a list of easy to prepare snacks that you will actually eat & enjoy
- Make a list of your favourite processed items and substitutes that you could make instead
- Planning a list of go-to meals while you are out at a restaurant or need to eat fast food
- Developing a consistent bedtime routine (going to bed and waking up at the same time each day- even the weekends)
- Limiting blue light exposure before bed (television, phones, etc)
- Create a comfortable sleeping environment (low temperature, light, and noise)
- Limit caffeine intake after lunch
- Make a realistic training schedule that fits into your current lifestyle, work schedule, and sleep schedule if possible.
- Find a training partner or have someone to keep you accountable
- Find a routine that you enjoy. Reach out to a coach if you do not feel confident or want some more guidance.
- Find an environment where you feel comfortable and welcome
- Drink a glass of water with every meal
- Mark a large water bottle with hourly goals
- Flavour your water
(4) build your support environment
Big changes are rarely done alone. The people in your home or work environment can have a big influence on your success – whether that be positively or negatively. In this section, identify one or two people that have the largest influence on your progress and talk through the following questions with them.
- Do they know that this goal is important to you and why?
- What do you need from them to be successful?
- What might they do (accidentally or not) to impede your progress and how are you going to address that before it comes up?
Let’s make this perfectly clear: you do not have to do this alone and we are all here to help each other. Having a supportive social environment with like minded people going through similar journeys is a recipe for success. Luckily we have that environment here, but there are many other options as well. Here is the question: which support environment are you going to lean on when things are tough, use for motivation, and grow together with? Some examples could be:
- Our Kick-Ass Private Facebook group
- A personal coach
- Your own personal social group
- A spouse or partner (this one can be tough)