3 Tips to Reach Your Summer Health Goals

Hi friend! Looking for tips to help you reach your summer health goals? Here are the strategies that helped me go from a chronically sluggish junk foodie to a more energetic vegetable maniac. 

Summer has really snuck up on us. 

There’s been so much upheaval – it seems like time has dragged by, but at the same time, that time has sped past before we could get done what we meant to do. 

If that’s the way you feel, you are not alone!

The truth is, it’s tough to maintain motivation for self-improvement when so much is changing and uncertain. 

And while this calls for giving yourself a certain amount of grace, it’s also a good case study for why we can’t depend on motivation to get things done. 

Usually, with summer coming up, we’re motivated to improve our health and, frankly, look better.  

What we need is a plan. 

So here are my three tips for reaching my health goals, and I think you’ll find they apply to you too:

3 Tips to Reach Your Summer Health Goals

Make small changes instead of adopting a total lifestyle overhaul

What are small, daily things you could change that will add up to significant results long-term? I like to emphasize the importance of creating habits, as I mentioned; motivation comes and goes, but habits are here to stay. 

So change small habits. For instance, getting into the habit of having a daily smoothie with leafy greens in it, or the habit of filling 50% of your plate with veggies, or simply drinking a glass of water as soon as you get up in the morning.  These are small things, but over the course of weeks and months, they create significant changes. 

Check out some of these articles to help you out: 

• 7 Genius Ways to Eat Super Foods on Busy Days
• 10 Simple Swaps for a Healthier Life
• 10 Steps to Healthier Living

Don’t deny yourself treats – just make them good for you.

What yummy treats can you swap out for something equally yummy but with health benefits? Feeling deprived is not a recipe for long-term sustainability, so in my opinion, unless you’re going on a 2-week-or-less crash diet to fit into a wedding dress or something of that nature, deprivation diets are not only not worth it, they’re often counter-productive, ingraining a feast or famine mentality. 

So while indulging in a legit dessert isn’t wrong, it also might not help you toward your goal of consuming fewer empty calories. So try swapping your typical no-bake cookies for healthy no-bake cookies, and perhaps try healthy chocolate chip cookie dough balls more often than you make butter cake. 

Create clear-cut goals

Think about it; does a road with no clear end really motivate you? Don’t just give yourself a vague “I want to be healthy” or “I want to be lean”. Make the goals clear as crystal. 

I like goals such as “I will be eating 85-90% whole foods within 4 weeks”, and then working backward from there to figure out the steps I need to take to get there. Another goal might be, “I want to lose four pounds this month.” Working backward from there, you can figure out how much you need to lose per week (one pound), and how much you need to eat to achieve that. 

I don’t personally like to have weight or size-specific goals – or at least I don’t want to promote having them, because in our society, I think too many of us put way too much pressure on ourselves to achieve something extra-human. 

However, at the same time, there is no shame in setting a weight-related goal, and the truth is that weight—or at least body fat percentage—is often an indicator of whether we’re getting closer to the health we want to achieve. 

My main word of caution would be to make sure your goals are incredibly reasonable. You’ve probably read from multiple sources that losing 1-2 pounds a week is a good goal. However, depending on your activity level, body fat level, and numerous other factors, it may not be suitable for you. If you set that 1 lb per week goal and only lose half a pound, would you be disappointed and give up? Make sure you think things like that through when you’re setting goals. 

Set A, B, and C Goals

This leads me to setting tiered goals: A, your ideal; B, your satisfactory; and C, your backup goal. 

That way, if you don’t hit your A goal, you still have something to check off your list. 

Back to the fat loss goal, you might not hit that 1 lb in a week. Weight loss isn’t linear, and you can find yourself not losing any weight at all, even though you’re doing all the right things. So, perhaps your B goal would be to stick to your plan for a month, even if you see no progress. (The good news is that the weight often comes off in a big chunk after seeing zero progress for a few weeks.)

A healthy eating goal might be… 

1. Eating 100% unprocessed food
2. Eating vegetables and protein at every meal
3. Eating vegetables every day

This kind of goal helps keep you from completely reverting to junk food on days when your idea isn’t possible, because you can still take steps to reach your goal.

Tools To Help You Reach Your Goals

Today, I wanted to let you know that I have some tools that can help you reach your health-related goals, and I’ve packaged five of them together so that you can get them all for the price of one.

• The Healthy Eating Goals Workbook (How to Set Healthy Goals. This will help you create a clear-cut plan to achieve what you specifically want to achieve. With a worksheet to determine and outline your specific priorities and your steps for reaching them. 
• The 90-Day Healthy Habits Guide. A template that walks you through 90 days of creating those habits we talked about above that lead to significant changes over time. This guide includes 4 sample starter habits, with printable 90-day checklists for each.
• 52 Hacks for a Healthier Life. This digital booklet includes 52 “hacks” or habits – small changes you can implement to make your life healthier – divided into four categories: morning health hacks, mealtime and cooking hacks, Healthy snacking hacks, and fitness hacks. These are a great addition to your 90 Healthy Habits guide, picking one at a time to implement and make a habit (with 52 of them, you can only imagine how much your health will change over time!). 

And then we have two recipe books to ensure you have the tools you need for a sustainable, healthy diet – one that still includes those important treats!

• Healthy No-Bake Treats. This one is great for summer! With 20 healthy treat recipes, you don’t have to heat up the oven to enjoy! One of my favorites is healthy no-bake cookies because they taste so indulgent, but they’re actually full of nutrition.
• Healthy Gluten-Free Desserts. This book includes 12 recipes with a little bit of overlap to the healthy no-bake treats book, but I had to include it anyway because it has some baked treats in it, like brownies, which I personally think are very important to have no matter how healthy my diet is. 😉 

These three tips, plus this e-book package, will help propel you toward your summer health goals so…

>Get it here for just $12.97<