The Best Way to Achieve Big Goals

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Having goals is fantastic. They give us something to pursue—a purpose. Moreover, having huge goals is outstanding. The bigger the objective, the better. However, sometimes being faced with such lofty dreams can be overwhelming. Suppose you have a grand intention and contemplate the enormous amount of time and effort that will be required for its achievement. In that case, you may very well experience discouragement from the beginning. So, although having gargantuan goals is admirable, it is often better to break your one colossal goal into many smaller and more manageable ones.

I love to run around my neighborhood. There is one hill not too far from my home that is relatively high and relatively steep. I love running up that hill. However, when I’m at the bottom of that hill and glance at the top, it seems so far away becomes more mentally challenging. The mental trick I find helpful is breaking that single large hill into several smaller hills. Allow me to explain. About halfway up the hill is a driveway on the left side. A short distance beyond that is a telephone pole on the right, and beyond that, there is another driveway on the left.  A bit past that is another telephone pole, and then it is about fifteen more feet to the top. 

When I begin running up that hill, my goal is not to get to the top. Instead, my goal is to get to the first driveway. Once I’m there, I feel a sense of accomplishment. The next thing I focus on is only getting to the first telephone pole. After that, my goal is the second driveway, then the telephone pole, and once there, I’m only about fifteen feet from the top. It is mentally much easier for me to run up the hill by breaking it up into several shorter distances.

Let’s illustrate this concept using a weight loss example. Let’s say you want to lose fifty pounds by eating healthy foods and increasing your level of physical activity. That is a terrific goal. However, losing fifty pounds can be intimidating. Thus, it would be much better to break this big goal into several smaller goals—perhaps losing three or four pounds each month. That’s it—only focus on losing three or four pounds over the next month. This is well within reach, and once accomplished, you will be rewarded with a great sense of satisfaction. Next, your only goal is to lose three or four pounds the following month. You will have lost weight, become healthier, and feel better each month. Then there will come the time when your scale will read fifty pounds less than it once did.

When you commit to achieving something significant, remember that gigantic goals are great, and the best way to accomplish them is by breaking them up into several smaller goals.

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Make the Easy Difficult and the Difficult Easy

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Building healthy habits is the best thing you can do if you’d like to start living a healthier lifestyle. However, I’ll admit that developing good habits can initially be challenging.

One thing you can do, especially in that difficult beginning stage, is to make the easy things difficult to do and make the difficult things easy to do.

Allow me to explain.

Let’s say that you are a person who currently loves snacking on unhealthy foods, but you’d like to change and instead begin eating healthier snacks such as fruits, vegetables, and some nuts. You love your cookies, candies, cakes, and chips. Whenever you get the munchies and are in the mood for a snack, all your favorite foods are right there in your kitchen. That’s easy, right?

So, you have to make the easy thing hard to do. This translates to ridding your home of all your favorite yet unhealthy snacks. Next, stock your kitchen pantry, refrigerator, and countertops with fruits, vegetables, and nuts—make the difficult thing easy to do.

The next time you are in the mood for a snack, all those healthy and tasty snacks will be easily accessible and right there for your enjoyment—easy, right? How about baby carrots and hummus? Or maybe a banana and grapes? 

Moreover, if you really want to snack on some junk food, you will have to leave your home and either walk or drive to the nearby store, which is going to be relatively difficult, and it will be less likely that you will do it. This will help you to start building healthy habits. 

This concept applies not only to health habits but to any behavior that you’d like to change. Let’s say that you are a shopaholic. You absolutely love going to the stores, buying all sorts of goodies, and paying for them with your favorite plastic card. However, let’s also declare that you want to change this habit and become more financially responsible. Well, in that case, make the easy thing difficult to do. I don’t remember where, but I remember reading somewhere the recommendation to put your favorite credit card in an empty coffee can, fill it with water, and place it in the freezer. The next time you have the urge to hit the stores, your credit card will be frozen in a block of ice. If you’d really like to go, you’ll have to wait for it to thaw. Hopefully, your impulse to shop will have passed by then.

Making the easy difficult and the difficult easy is a great way to help build new habits.

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The Swap Challenge: Week Four

Welcome to the end of the final week of the Swap Challenge!

I hope everyone was able to swap out at least one unhealthy meal for a healthy one each week over the past month. More importantly, I hope that you found it delicious and satisfying. 

This week I’d like to share a tuna recipe without the tuna. It uses chickpeas and vegan mayonnaise and is delicious.

You can find it here: Chuna Salad Sandwich.

When I made mine, I didn’t have the pickles, and it was still mouthwatering.

If you are just beginning your journey to a healthy lifestyle, I hope this was a great start for you.

Be well!

The Swap Challenge: Week Three

How are you doing for week three of The Swap Challenge?

I hope that you have swapped out at least one unhealthy meal for a healthy one this week and are feeling great about it. 

This week I made sweet potato-black bean enchiladas. This recipe was a bit more involved, but definitely worth it! 

You can find it here: sweet potato-black bean enchiladas.

One more week to go!

Take Advantage of Momentum and Become Unstoppable

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Two of the most important things you can do to help maintain good health and help prevent the development of lifestyle-related diseases, such as diabetes and heart disease, are eating healthy foods and exercising. If you are not accustomed to doing these things regularly, it may very well be difficult to get to this place. So, what can you do to move in the right direction?

The most important thing, the key factor, is the establishment of healthy routines and habits. If you can develop healthy routines and habits, everything else will become simple and fall right into place. Understandably, the initial set-up of healthy habits may be challenging. I would thus like to offer two ideas to help get you started on your journey.

First, I believe that for most people, trying to accomplish too much too quickly may be overwhelming and possibly become a setup for failure. As a result, it is better to start small, take baby steps, and gradually advance. 

The next ideas I want to share are concepts I learned back in my college physics class—inertia and momentum. Inertia is the propensity for a body to remain unchanged with regard to its motion. So, if a body is at rest, it will tend to stay at rest. Momentum can be thought of as the energy gained by a body in motion. 

How about a practical example demonstrating how these concepts can help a person develop healthy routines? Let’s say that you don’t run at all and would like to run for thirty minutes five times each week. Currently, you have a great deal of inertia—you don’t run at all and would tend to remain in this state. However, once you start to break free from your inertia, by perhaps going for a light run twice this week for five minutes each time, you will also begin to build a small amount of momentum. Next week you might commit to running three times for ten minutes each time. You’ve just broken free from more inertia and have developed more momentum. You then decide that you will run four times the following week for ten minutes each session, and then for the next two weeks, you will increase your time for those runs to fifteen minutes. Each week you will be unloading more inertia, developing greater momentum, and finding that the runs are becoming easier and more enjoyable. Over the ensuing weeks, you will hit your goal and feel fantastic. The momentum you have developed will make you unstoppable!

These all-important concepts of inertia and momentum are not only pertinent to running. They can be applied to almost anything else. Some other things that come to mind are eating healthy, studying a new language, practicing a sport, or learning a new skill, such as playing the piano. You can achieve so much in life by breaking free from inertia and taking advantage of momentum.

The Swap Challenge: Week Two

Welcome to week two of the Swap Challenge!

I hope everyone has been having a great week.

Feel free to leave a comment if you have swapped out an unhealthy meal for a healthy one.

I prepared pizza with creamed spinach, sun-dried tomatoes, red onion, and olives this week. The cream part of the creamed spinach was made from tofu!

I found the recipe on forksoverknives.com.

It was delicious.

Be well, and have a fantastic week!