National Health Goals

Introduction

Making Lifestyle Changes

• Many adults want to make lifestyle changes but are unable to do so.
• Practicing one healthy lifestyle does not mean you will practice another, though adopting one healthy behavior often leads to adoption of another.
• People do not make lifestyle changes overnight. Rather, people progress forward and backward through several stages of change.
• Once maintenance is attained, relapse is less likely to occur.

Factors that Promote Lifestyle Change

• There are many factors associated with achieving advanced stages of healthy behavior.
• Personal factors effect health behaviors but are often out of your personal control.
• Predisposing factors are important in getting you started with the process of change.
• Enabling factors are important in moving you from the beginning stages of change to action and maintenance.
• Reinforcing factors are important in adhering to life style changes.

Self Management Skills

• Learning self-management skills can help you alter factors that lead to healthy lifestyle change.
• It takes time to change unhealthy lifestyles.

Self-Planning for Healthy Lifestyles:

• Clarifying your reasons for changing a behavior is an important first step in program planning.
• Self-assessments are useful in establishing personal needs, planning your program, and evaluating your progress.
• Periodic self-assessments can aid in determining if a person is meeting health, wellness, and fitness standards and is making progress toward personal goals.
• Self-assessments have the advantage of consistent error rather than variable error.
• Learning to set realistic goals is useful as a basis for self-planning.
• Beginners are encouraged to focus on short-term goals.
• Short-term goals should be behavioral goals rather than outcome goals.
• Long-term goals can be either behavioral or outcome goals.
• It is appropriate to consider maintenance goals.
• Making improvement can motivate you to reach long-term goals.
• Putting your goals in writing helps formalize them.
• There are many different program components from which you can choose to meet your goals.
• Preparing a written plan can improve your adherence to the plan.
• Self-assessment and self-monitoring can help you evaluate progress.

Strategies for Action Many people feel that factors influencing health and wellness are out of their control. With practice, you can improve self-management skills that lead to acquiring and maintaining healthy lifestyles. Assessing self-management skills that influence healthy lifestyles provides a basis for changing your health, wellness, or fitness. You can benefit from a critical analysis of the theories and models that help us understand the factors that lead to healthy living.

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