Aligning Ourselves with a Better Diet and a Healthier Lifestyle

This past spring I offered a cleanse program and there was quite a bit of interest. I guided several clients through the program and there were several others who expressed interest but never followed through. It’s easy to understand why. For some people the changes in diet and lifestyle necessary to participate fully in our cleanse program, even for a short period of time, are a bit far from where they’re at to make the journey.

So I started thinking about how to meet more folks half way (or even 3/4 of the way!). After all, making changes to our diet and lifestyle is not easy. When taking clients through the cleanse I always remind them – “it’s only temporary,” but of course if we’re going to undertake making significant changes, even temporarily, we’d likely want to see some of those changes last, especially if they’re working for us.

If I want to make changes to my diet but I don’t want to bite off more than I can chew, it may work better for me to make smaller changes and to set targets closer to where I’m starting from. In this way I can begin to establish a direction of change that helps me align with my intentions and improves my ability to stay on the path on which I’ve started.

For instance, one of my clients asked me to give him some advice about changing his diet. Before I could do that, I needed to see where he was at, so I asked him to keep a food journal for a week or so and then give it to me to look over. After seeing what he was eating I had several recommendations in mind, but based on his age and his food journal I could tell that he had some long standing habits that were going to be a little tough to break.

I suggested he just do one thing – give up refined sugar, just temporarily, for a two week period. My guess is that he was seeking a bit more than this, but I saw the refined sugar in his diet as the low hanging fruit that would offer the most bang for his buck, or so to speak. If he wasn’t eating sugar he would immediately see the benefits in how he felt and that would encourage him to make other changes leading to further benefits and providing further encouragement. Before long he would have made some pretty significant changes with some pretty substantial results to show for it. In other words it was this one change that I saw as the key first step on his journey toward a better diet.

I wish I could say now that it was a huge success and that he’s eating better and he’s healthier than he has ever been, but alas it’s only partly true. That first step turned out to be one that he wasn’t prepared to make at that time. Nonetheless, my recommendation did seem to plant an important seed in his consciousness. Currently he’s following a different cleanse from a book he purchased recently and he is in fact eating healthier than he has in a long time, maybe ever.

So while I realize I can’t take full credit for the change in my client’s diet (maybe not much credit at all!), his story does illustrate my point. We all have to get started somewhere on the path to better health, and we need a doable plan to get us started. But more than anything we need a first step that points us in the right direction.