Making Nutrition Goals That Work
When working with clients, we focus a lot on making and reaching goals. After an initial session full of nutrition education, follow up appointments are largely driven by holding our clients accountable to specific goals they make at the end of each session. From there, we help clients build upon their goals after each session until they have totally transformed the way they live and eat. The reason we do this is because throughout our years of working with people one on one, we have found that making sustainable small goals along the way is the most effective way to create healthy and well-balanced lifestyles in the long run.
Why Goals Work
So why do we focus on making goals with our clients? Making goals allows people to articulate what’s important to them and focus on what they want to see change in their life. Furthermore, having concrete goals then provides a way for them to be held accountable both to themselves and to others. This is true in all areas of life, not just health and nutrition. For example, it is easy to have wishful thinking and say “I want to eat healthier.” It is completely different to have a goal that says “I am going to eat one source of non starchy vegetables with 4 of my dinners this week.”
Wishful thinking shows you want something to be different, but goals allow you to articulate exactly what it will look like for you to accomplish eating healthier. If you make specific goals (like eating more non starchy vegetables) and know how you are going to accomplish them, then you will find yourself so much more confident going into each day and week because you will know exactly what you need to do to get to where you want to be.
Making Goals for Your Life
When making goals, it’s important to focus on your own life and priorities. So often, people come to appointments and say they want to know how to eat exactly like someone they saw online or look exactly like someone they know. The problem with this type of thinking is that it is taking principles from other people’s lives and bodies and tries to make your life fit into that mold. As a result, you will often find yourself disappointed. Everyone’s life is different, therefore everyone’s goals and healthy lifestyle will look slightly different as well.
Instead, when making your own goals, learn about what is true about food, nutrition, and health for everyone. Then from there figure out what it looks like for your specific life. Everyone has different nutritional needs, deficits, schedules, preferences, body types, genetic history, and more, so we can’t expect what worked for someone else to work for you. Rather, it is important to make goals that meet your specific needs and meet you where you are at. As a result, you will be so much more effective in seeing progress and be able to build a lifestyle that will be sustainable for the long term.
Make Your Own Practical Goals
In order to make effective goals with people for their unique lifestyle needs, we focus on helping people make SMART goals. SMART goals are a familiar concept to many of us, but it’s helpful to remind yourself of them as you begin to make both short and long term goals.
S- Make specific goals. This means that you should focus on exactly what you want to change. Don’t just say “I want to eat healthier” or “I want to be more fit.” Instead, articulate what you want to be healthier about your food intake and what you want to improve in your fitness. Do you want to eat more vegetables? Eat less fried foods? Be able to run a mile without stopping? Be specific so you can know exactly what to focus on throughout each day.
M- Make Measurable goals. You need to have some way to measure your success in reaching your goal. This means finding a way to associate a measurement with your goal. For example, talk to your dietitian about what a healthy weight goal would be for you, or pick a specific distance you want to be able to run. Whatever it is, measuring your goal will help you celebrate your success and know how much farther you have to go if you didn’t meet it.
A- Make an Attainable goal. This means meeting yourself where you’re at. While I was growing up my dad used to say “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.” Although this is a silly example, it is a helpful concept to remember when trying to transform your health. Trying to change everything about your life all at once only leads to burnout. Instead, make goals that slowly build upon where you’re at now. Then, over time, you will eat away at the elephant and see big changes in your life.
R- Make Realistic goals. Realistic goals are similar to attainable goals, but have a slight difference. While making attainable goals you are making sure what you want to accomplish can happen. Realistic goals focus on things that are relevant and should happen. You want to make goals that will realistically fit into your life and help you achieve a healthy result that really matters in the long run. You want to make goals that matter and that you can keep around for the long-haul, not goals that are not relevant to health and your life.
T- Make goals that are Time-Bound. This is an important part of goal making. It is easy to make goals and allow yourself unlimited time to do them. As a result, you will always be able to push action back until later. Instead, if you are bound by time in your goal then you will be pushed toward action instead of procrastination. Being time-bound will make you aware that you have to work towards the goal by a specific point in time. This holds you accountable, and as a result allows you to accomplish goals quicker and more efficiently than you would be able to otherwise.
Following the guidelines above when making goals will help you build plans that will hold you accountable to building the healthy lifestyle you’ve always wanted. A healthy and sustainable lifestyle is possible, you just have to learn how to work towards it.
Email us at natalie@nutrition502.com or schedule a FREE discovery call today to get started reaching your goals with us today (telehealth and in person appointments available)!