Making Your Resolutions Stick

How to Create Healthy Habits

NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTIONS--they're easy to make but easier to break. Why is it so hard to make the healthy changes that we know can help us feel better and live longer? And why is it so hard to make them last? Scientists are learning more about how we can make healthy changes and, even more important, how we can sustain them.

"CHANGE IS ALWAYS POSSIBLE," says Dr. Linda Nebeling, an expert in behavioral change and nutrition at the National Institutes of Health. You're never too out-of-shape, too overweight, or too old to make healthy changes.

Think of exactly how the change will enhance your life. Reducing stress might cut your risk for heart disease and help you fight off germs. Even small improvements in your physical activity, weight, or nutrition, may help reduce your risk for disease and lengthen your life. In one study, overweight or obese people who lost just 7% of their body weight slashed their risk for diabetes by nearly 60%. Keeping facts like this in mind can help you maintain your focus over the long haul.

Of course, you don't need a new year to make healthy changes; you can make them any time of the year. But New Year's is an opportunity to think about the improvements you'd like to make and then take concrete steps to achieve them. Set realistic goals, develop an action plan, and set it in motion. Make your new year a healthy one.

Source: http://newsinhealth.nih.gov/issue/Dec2010

To think about it...

IF CHRISTIAN WOMEN would lead out in the good work, and set the example of dressing with neatness and simplicity, and with regard to health, there would be a universal reform. If they would work from an elevated standpoint, they could bring their habits of life into conformity with the laws of their being, and live in obedience to both the physical and the moral requirements of God.

Then there would be less money, less nerve force, less physical strength, squandered for artificial decorations, to the sacrifice of natural beauty. We should have more practical wives and mothers, and in many families that are now wretched because of their incorrect ideas of life, there would be a happy change. --Christ Temperance and Bible Hygiene, p. 92.2

Prayer Corner

• International Women's Day of Prayer
• Revival and Reformation
• For the Holy Spirit in our lives
• Women who are fighting terminal diseases

Calendar

• February 1 -- Division Statistical Reports due to GCWM Office
• March 5 -- WM International Day of Prayer
• March 6 -- Human Rights Day
• March 8 -- Women's International day

FEBRUARY 4 - WORLD CANCER DAY

More than ever before there is a need for a concerted and coordinated fight against cancer, and we believe that World Cancer Day can play its part by providing an even bigger platform for your cancer messages.