Try New Way To Reach Your Health & Fitness Goals

Hi SparkPeople Members

I'm writing to tell you about a new feature on SparkPeople (both the app and the website) that is a fun way to reach goals.

As many of you know if you've listened to me, I'm a big fan of trying to make life into a game by figuring out how to make improvements in all areas of life as a way to reach goals. We call this "Crisscross effects."

Here are some quick examples of this concept:

• Improving fitness leads to physiological reduction in stress levels, which can decrease the odds of emotional eating
• Getting sunshine increases vitamin D levels which can help prevent issues like Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), a form of depression, which can make it hard to live a healthy lifestyle
• Supporting other people helps build your confidence in all areas of life
• Good sleep makes everything easier
• Good fitness makes it easier to have good sleep

Do you see how all of these areas of life go together? I could list about 100 more of these. This would be a fun exercise someday :).

On the other hand, let's think about someone who has a goal to lose 50 pounds and primarily goes about this by focusing on calories alone. This plan could work fine until:

• Something stressful happens causing emotional eating, frustration, and falling off the "diet"
• Winter comes and the lack of sunshine causes some level of SAD making it harder to stay on track
• Poor sleep leads to fatigue making it harder to prepare healthy meals and instead grabbing fast food or extra caffeine or sugary foods and drinks
• Many more

You can see the first set of examples sets someone up for a true healthy lifestyle change that can last a lifetime and continual improvement by reaching goals in all areas of life.

The second set of examples can work for sure in terms of weight loss -- but the odds are significantly higher that this person will end up falling off the wagon either during the weight loss stage or the maintenance stage and need to go through the process again (and again...).

On a related note, much of the research that talks about how weight loss is mostly about nutrition drives me nuts. In a vacuum this might be true, but it misses so much of the big picture of real life where people need to balance so much.

This is why I worked with our team to build the "Track Goals" feature in our new community goal feed that launched last week -- to encourage people to start thinking and tracking goals in different ways.

I thought it would be fun to do a test called the Goal Patrol -- a group of people who make it a goal to track at least one goal to the feed on most days. Or a variation could be to track one nutrition/fitness goal and also one goal from some other area of life.

Another part of this challenge is that we can be Healthy Leaders to each other by encouraging each other with likes and comments on posted goals. This small way to support others can change lives -- including the life of the person giving the support!

I have been posting to the feed and it's fun to both post and support others!

Once you go to the feed either on the main screen of the SparkPeople app or by clicking here, all you need to do to track a goal to the feed is:

1. Click the "+" sign next to "Have something to share" at the top of the feed
2. Click the "Track Goal" button
3. Select one of the main categories (Nutrition, Fitness, Motivation, Other Goals) -- then you will see the goals for that category
4. Select a goal
5. Optional -- enter a text comment related to the goal you reached and/or add a photo. Comments make it more fun for others to support you.

That's it! Once you try this one time, you will see how easy it is to track a goal to the feed. Note that if you track a fitness goal, this will automatically go to your fitness tracker in addition to the feed.

I also did a video about this if you'd like to watch on my blog.

You can also let me know your thoughts on this in the comments on the blog.

Thanks for your support!

SparkCheers!

Chris "SparkGuy" Downie



Chris (SparkGuy)

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