Planning is one of the keys to maintaining a healthy lifestyle long-term. Now that you’re creating new healthy habits, you might as well make sure you’re setting yourself up for success.Planning is one of those activities that people either obsess over or think it’s silly.
While it doesn’t always break down this way, Type A people tend to hold tight to their checklists and take great pride in crossing off a to-do. In fact, Type A’s (like me) almost love making checklists more then they enjoy actually doing the things on the list. We’re list people and planning isn’t a problem for us. It’s hardwired.
Type B’s on the other hand are much more go-with-the-flow, so it’s hard to understand why a plan is needed at all. Activities will get done when they get done and if it’s not important then it probably won’t get done and it’s not a big deal. (Except to Type A people.)
Plan for Success
Whether you enjoy planning or not, at the end of the day you can’t move forward if you don’t know where you’re going. You can set the intention to create more space, but if you don’t know how you’re going to do it, then it probably won’t happen and it will be harder to create a habit.
If you don’t create healthy habits, it will feel like a drag to live healthy all the time because you won’t nail down an automatic routine. And that’s how people end up living unhealthy lives.
Let’s look at some examples of how you can plan for healthy living.
You’ve already created your intention and you’ve started to look at what healthy habit you’re going to create in the coming month. What do you need to do to set up that cue for your healthy habit to take form?
What do you need to make your routine as easy as possible? And what reward are you going to give yourself for completing your healthy routine?
Say your intention is to eat well three times a week. Plan those three healthy meals every Sunday and go to the grocery store to stock up.
If your intention is to practice more yoga, put those yoga classes on your calendar each week before you plan anything else. Commit to yourself and your health!
Planning tools
Grab yourself a calendar or day planner to track your health and wellness. Moleskin makes a specific planner for living well, Productive Flourishing just launched a brand new 5X8 Essential Daily Planner that is simple and allows you to keep track of the big picture and the little details at the same time, and if you prefer the computer, then take some time to really categorize your life in your iCal so that you can color code your activities as you plan.
For menu-planning, I love Knock Knock’s What to Eat tear off pad, the Grocery IQ app for making grocery lists, and I’m starting to experiment with Big Oven as well, which is like a glorified Grocery IQ that also lets you search new recipes based on the ingredients you have in your kitchen already.
The most important thing is that you make planning a habit! Every Sunday I sit down and plan my week ahead. I make my menu for the week, plan my workouts, and check my calendar so I know what’s coming up.
Stay on Track
Living healthy and well is not easy, otherwise we would all have the perfect most healthy lives! Stressful situations come up at work, emergencies happen at home, and unexpected inconveniences will pop up on cue right when you feel like there is no more time in the day for anything. Having a plan helps you stay on track.
If it’s hard at first, that’s good. Planning is a healthy habit in and of itself.
This week, pick one planning tool/activity that feels comfortable and useful and fun to you and then create a habit around planning to be well!
Share with me on the Facebook page what one planning tool or activity you’re going to implement next week.
