Building Confidence in Your Health Routine

Starting out on a new health routine can be scary, intimidating, overwhelming and so many other feelings. All the emotions you feel around starting on a health journey are valid, so today I’m going to share a few of my favourite tips for building confidence on the journey to a new health routine.

When starting out on a health routine I want you to start small. If you’ve been around any length of time then this will sound like a broken record to you, but if your new please listen up. Overhauling everything all at once never works so start small. How small…well that’s individual but as small as you need to in order to see success is usually a good start. Often when someone gets in their head that they are going to start implementing new health behaviours into their life they decide to overhaul everything all at once. Instead start by picking one thing you would like to improve.

Let’s say you want to start eating more vegetables and you set a goal for yourself that you are going to eat at least once vegetable with every meal. Start by asking yourself…”on a scale of 1 (not confident at all) to 10 (completely confident) how confident am I that I can eat a vegetable with every meal. This answer will differ from one person to the next, but let’s say that you feel that you are at about a 6 for confidence level. If you are under an 8 I want you to start to pare the goal back a bit. Instead of eating a vegetable at every meal let’s try adding a vegetable to just your dinner. Now when you do your confidence check you answer with a 9/10. You’re already doing this most nights of the week so that seems like a simple thing to do in your life.

See what I did there? Pairing the goal back to being something that you are very confident you can succeed breads both confidence in yourself and often leads you to success…which in turn gives you more confidence. So now you can see how starting small can be beneficial in building those confidence in the behaviour and also in adding more new behaviours over time. It seems simple Ashlee…so what’s the catch. Honestly, there isn’t one…however what you do need to understand is that this is not a quick fix. You aren’t going to see improvements instantly and you will need to learn to be okay with that. Small helps you build successful habits that will last a lifetime, small builds you up and allows you to see that you can do this, small is success.

Although starting small is easily the most effective way to build confidence in your new health habits planning is the other tactic I use daily. As you will see here planning takes a couple different routes for me.

First off, I plan my workouts out ahead of time and print them off placing them in a binder. Some people prefer to do this electronic and that’s completely fine. I like to have them printed off so that I can record my sets, reps, weights and any other notes on them but all this can also be done electronically (your call). If you don’t design your own workouts you can still do this, you’re just likely going to use a program that someone else has designed. Make sure you are doing your research and using programs from reputable sources. When you are choosing your overall fitness program, remember the start small rule. If you are a very sedentary individual then consider starting with a couple workouts a week instead of jumping right into 5 or 6 days.

Another one of my favourite ways to plan is meal planning. If you want more information on my typical meal plan ritual you can check it out here. But to give you a brief overview about once a month I create a plan to prepare and freeze meals. These meals help keep me on track for my lunches at work as well as helping us out on nights when we just don’t want to cook. Do we still get takeout…absolutely. But this helps us not go that route quite as often. If you are looking to improve your nutrition meal planning and prep can be a hugely beneficial process. The other option is to plan your meals ahead for the week. I will admit that deciding what we are going to eat for dinner is always a pain in our house, but if we lay our meals out ahead of time it can often help build confidence in the fact that we are going to have healthy meals throughout the week.

The final way I use planning each week is to write out an overview of my workouts for the week. I love using a wipe board for this because there is a ton of satisfaction in being able to wipe it right off after you complete it for the week. This gives me a high overview of my workouts for the week but seeing it written out helps keep me accountable and keeps me moving forward through the week. Again, remember to start small…your workout schedule doesn’t need to look like 5 or 6 days a week to start. You’ll notice that I technically only have 4 days a week that I lift. The other days I focus on walking and often there is one day a week that I end up taking a full rest day. And there is nothing wrong with that.

My top two tips for building confidence in your health and fitness routine are hands down to start small and to plan ahead. These two things will allow you to build these health routines slowly over time which will help you develop a consistent practice that will change your life over time. Trust the process and move forward a little bit each day.