My 10-Step Plan To Address My Dressing Up

1. Goal: For me, that was to get back into my shirts. In his excellent book ‘Atomic Habits‘, James Clear maintains that to make a habit stick (like a diet), make it visible. So, for example, if you want to eat more fruit, leave it out on the kitchen table; don’t hide it in the fridge (out of sight, out of mind). So, visible for me was hanging my shirts outside the wardrobe, so I see them from the minute I wake up in the morning and the last thing before I go to bed, reinforcing the habit to lose weight to fit into them!
2. Reality: Where are you now? What have you done so fare? What has worked in the past? What hasn’t worked? What resources do you need – diet, exercise, help
3. Diet: The best way to do that is with a food app I use, ‘Nutra Check‘; it’s brilliant and has all the major food brands. Choose your menu for Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner, and it will give you the KCAL and FATg of whatever food you enter. The best thing for me is it also has an exercise column even dancing is listed.
4. Exercise: For me, that is a 2-mile walk each day and dancing a couple of times a week – you have no idea how much weight you can lose when you dance, and it’s a great alternative to a gym. Again, you can download a step tracker on your phone to monitor your progress
5. Help: Who else needs to be with you to achieve your goal? What support might you need sticking with the diet and the exercise? Do you need to join a group to keep up the motivation, have an exercise buddy.
6. Outcome: Remember, it’s not about losing the weight. It’s about what losing weight will give you. What would it look and feel like? For me, I do a visualisation exercise wearing my shirts dancing. For you, it could be fitting into your favourite dress, a pair of jeans, looking great in a swimsuit sitting by the pool on holiday. Research has shown the more accurately we can visualise something – using all our senses – the more likely it is to happen.
7. Tracking: Weigh yourself same time every day or week – there are different schools of thought on this. Get yourself some accurate digital scales. My old mechanical ones were four pounds out (most upsetting). You can update the results to the app and monitor your progress.
8. Action: Take tiny steps. Acknowledge and reward yourself for milestones reached along the way.
9. Enjoy: It’s a marathon, not a sprint.
10. Celebrate your success for achieving your goal.

Conclusion

The app tells me that I will have lost the best part of two stone by February if I keep on track. Now that’s a plan.

You can watch a YouTube clip on Friday dance night here