Fat Burning Exercise: Are You Ready to Change? by Anders N W Lindgreen

It is a valid question; if you are not ready it wouldn’t matter if all the opportunities in the world lay at your feet because you’d be walking all over them with soles so thick that you wouldn’t feel a thing. Not even access to the world’s best fat burning exercise would do you much good.

To better understand where you are I will use and explain the Stages of Change model developed in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s by James Prochaska and Carlo DiClemente at the University of Rhode Island when they were studying how smokers were able to give up their habits.

Determining exactly which stage you are at and what you need to advance to the next is absolute key. But it is also equally important to your support network (friends and family) to understand where you are to make sure that their thoughtfulness does not become an unnecessary obstacle in your journey.

The 5 Stages of Change:

1. Precontemplation

In the precontemplation stage, you are not yet ready to realise that there are any issues and you are not accepting help from anyone. People may actually keep you in this stage by trying to force change upon you and thus the harder they are trying to push you the more you are likely to resist. In this stage you may even find yourself defending your bad habits out of sheer principle or obliviousness.

2. Contemplation

In the contemplation stage, there has been a shift in your thinking. You have started to realise the consequences of your ways and even though you are not sure whether you really want to do anything about it or not; you are weighing the pro’s against the con’s and are now open to receive information from friends and family.

3. Preparation

In the preparation stage, you are now committed to do something about it. It is a deeper acknowledgement and a realization that the problem is serious and that you cannot allow it to go on any longer. You begin by researching your options and strategies available to achieve your goal (like reading this book e.g.).

4. Action

In the action stage, you have put your money where your mouth is and you are doing courage by acting. It may be one step forward two steps back at times but make no mistake, you are on your way and with the right guidance and information you will get there as long as you persist for long enough.

5. Maintenance

In the maintenance stage, you have reached your target and are now hard at work trying to maintain what you have got. We cannot fall back into past habits here or we will fall flat on our face and may end up right where we started. Your body will always choose the easy option and habits you have held on to for decades die hard and so you must persist daily to build new and more permanent ones.

Relapse

When you try to skip a stage, quit reinforcing or in any other way shortcutting change you run a serious risk to relapse all the way back to the beginning. The moral of the story is that is takes effort, it takes time and once you have it you cannot let it go. Make it a lifestyle and not a fad.