Here at Mindel Health and Wellness, we talk about “health esteem,” and work to improve it. Your Health Esteem is how you feel about the status of your overall health. We’re all about checking in with ourselves and looking (without judgement) at our current levels of health, what is working well for us, and what needs improvement.
By checking in with our health esteem, we can determine how well our current lifestyle plan is suiting us. Health is a journey, and each day is an opportunity to improve our well being. By setting goals and making a plan, we can make better choices each day that can get us to our goals.
Let’s look at your health esteem today, right now. How are you doing? What is your current biggest struggle when trying to focus on your health? Is it pain? A chronic illness? Injury? Excess weight? Mindset? Lack of motivation? Lack of a defined direction? What is the biggest hurdle that’s keeping you from moving forward?
Now let’s look at your current plan. Have you identified a defined goal? Setting a concrete, specific goal can be instrumental in achieving success. Rather than “I want to lose this extra weight,” try “I’m going to lose 5 pounds before my vacation at the end of August.” Instead of “I need to improve my health,” narrow in on a specific goal, like “I want to improve my shoulder pain from a level 8 to a level 5 in the next 3 months” or “I will eliminate my soda/ coffee/ sugar habit by lowering my intake by 1 serving per day, and increase that by an additional 1 serving each week.”
Don’t forget that long term goals need short term, definable, concrete, specific goals that give you a road map to the final destination! You should be reassessing your goals every few weeks. Once a short term goal is achieved, add in another challenge that gets you further along. And don’t forget to celebrate your achievements! This is part of having a good health esteem: you may not be where you want to be, but each day you should be climbing closer to your goal. Celebrate your successes! Focus on the positive gains!
At the end of each day, reflect upon your choices. What went well? What victories can you celebrate? What challenges did you face? How well did you face them? If you struggled or failed in some way, what can you change to avoid that failure in the future? We all struggle, we all have bad days (or weeks or months), but we need to see those challenges as opportunities, not obstacles (See my blog post on that HERE). We can’t change things that are out of our control, but we can always change our perspective and our responses to those challenges. Build up that health esteem by focusing on positives, meeting challenges with a defined plan, and letting go. Negative self talk, berating ourselves for “failure,” seeing only our flaws… these do no one any good, and they themselves create obstacles in our path toward progress.
Love yourself for who you are today. Embrace it. We, all of us, with all of our flaws, our brokenness, our shortcomings, are perfect in our imperfection. You are, today, right now, where God intends you to be. Celebrate the uniqueness of you! Celebrate your small victories and your ability to change yourself for the better. Every day is a new opportunity to increase overall health esteem.
As always, I’m here to help! Let’s work together to define your goals and make a specific plan with do-able steps to get you to your goal and increase your health! Reach out HERE.
Blessings,
Melanie
