Dr Anna Rolleston The Cardiac Clinic

Are you wanting to make a difference to your health in 2012 – a real difference?

Are you wanting to achieve something that has perhaps been on your resolution list for a number of years? Lose weight, better manage your blood sugar, be more active, eat better or simply feel better. Have you tried before and not had much success? Or have you tried before and been successful for a period of time, then gone back to square one after a while? Do you want a better way?

From experience, lifestyle change – real lifestyle change – takes a long time and requires not only your time and dedication, but support from those around you. Quick fix schemes are notorious for working initially, but they tend to be difficult to maintain. Examples of quick fixes are diets and exercise ‘challenges'. If we take the diet example – you can lose a significant amount of weight by dramatically changing the way that you eat, but dramatic changes are hard to maintain long term and eventually people go back to their old ways and the weight they lost comes back on and usually more of it too. Exercise challenges are fantastic for motivation and variety in a lifestyle that already includes regular exercise and in this case, I encourage them. If your aim is to start being more active and make exercise a regular part of your life, however, a challenge is unlikely to be sustainable long term. This is because an exercise challenge is dramatically different from your current lifestyle and therefore you will see quick results, but you are unlikely to be able to maintain the exercise after the challenge period is up.

A better way of managing lifestyle change is the slowly, but surely approach. Small changes over a longer period of time do not illicit immediate results, but long term they are sustainable compared to the quick fix ideal. If you have a lifestyle goal, it is likely to be multifaceted – some changes to the way you eat, some changes to your activity levels, some changes to specific health issues. There are no rules in terms of where you start or how you go about making those changes except only change a couple of things at a time. For example, if you want to lose weight and reduce your heart attack risk, then you probably have to make food changes, exercise more often, reduce the stress in your life and get a bit of rest and relaxation into your schedule. Use a diary so you can record your ‘process' and your progress and tell someone what you are doing so that on those inevitable days when you feel unmotivated you have got someone who can help you along. Here is an example timeline – remember this is different for every person and for the purpose of this article describes the ‘slowly but surely' process.

Week 1 and 2: Walk for 20min, 4 days per week and stop having pudding after dinner.

Week 3 and 4: Consciously increase fruit and vegetable intake by adding 2 extra vegetables to every dinner meal and having a piece of fruit with lunch.

Week 5 and 6: Increase walking to 25min 4 days per week and reduce alcohol intake to 1 standard drink per day.

At the end of week 6, review and write the next 6 weeks of your process. Your process will evolve over time and eventually, without any dramatic changes, you will be living a new lifestyle. Give it a go. What have you got to lose?