Printer-friendly versionSend to friendPDF version

Nutrition: Prioritize Your Priorities

Many times when we have areas of life we earnestly want to improve we still fall short of achieving the goal. Why does this occur, especially when the goal can be as fundamentally important to our health and well-being as good nutrition?

If we look carefully at our unachieved goals, we may find that we have failed to prioritize our priorities. How can we go about making our nutritional health a priority so we can bring to fruition our intention?

1. Determine the nutrition program that you plan to follow. Consult with a nutritionist if you have any questions about what might work best for you.

2. Know what works best for you. You may need a highly structured way of achieving your nutritional goals (a plan that tells you exactly what to eat and when) or you may just need certain parameters (such as how many servings of each food group and the number of calories needed per day).

3. Make sure that nutrition is a high priority for you every day. For example, you might choose not to skip lunch when you get busy at work. You might always have water available. You might give each meal, snack and beverage forethought. You may choose to be very diligent about what you eat for breakfast knowing that it will set the tone (and blood sugar stability) for the rest of the day.

4. Remember to connect your priorities back to your goals. For example, you might want to eat soundly because you a) need and want to keep up with your children, b) you want to have energy to sustain a demanding and fulfilling lifestyle, c) you want to look and feel your very best, and d) you want be as healthy as possible utilizing food as (preventative) medicine.

5. When we write down our goals we are a great deal more likely to achieve them. Scheduling in your planner your meals time to plan, prepare and eat will make it much more likely that your nutritional goals will be met.

6. Hiring a life coach can help considerably with accountability. You might create meal plans and work on prioritizing daily nutritional habits. Working with a life coach can help you trouble shoot so that good nutritional habits take hold and become natural and effortless.