One path to kick-starting a healthier lifestyle: Start small

NEW YORK (AP) — Wellness advice seems to be everywhere these days, but change can be hard. How do you start a journey toward better health that you can stick with, and not be overwhelmed?

Among the experts’ advice: Start with a little and it can turn into something big. Be consistent. Try to find people who can help you stay the course.

Define ‘wellness’ and start small

Kristina Schuldt is a family medicine physician and wellness director for about 14,000 employees of the Mayo Clinic Health System.

“Wellness means different things to people. There’s fitness and physical wellness, but there’s also mental wellness, financial wellness, spiritual wellness,” she said. “A person should define what their wellness goal is.”

Don’t take on the entire wellness universe at once, she warned. Start with small steps.

Increase water intake, for example, using a bottle or jug big enough to hold a day’s worth, with markings on the side to let you see how much you drink. If quitting smoking is the goal, cut down by one cigarette until it feels comfortable, then do the same thing again and again.

That goes for getting your steps in, too. If you’re not used to long walks, start with a few blocks and increase by two every week.

In the kitchen, experiment with healthy foods to find out which ones you like. Will it be pumpkin but not kale? Flaxseed but not cranberries? Don’t force yourself to eat foods you don’t like. At the table, eat slowly. Savor each bite and try to recognize when you’re nearly full.

“Go with what we call the low-hanging fruit at first,” Schuldt said of first steps overall.

Find people to support you

At her heaviest, Jenny Watson weighed 420 pounds. In January 2023, she said, “I was at a point where I was like, I can’t do this anymore. I’m tired. My body hurts. I had hit rock bottom.”

Watson, a 36-year-old mom of two and a hairstylist in suburban Dallas, tried a lot of fitness programs before finding one that stuck. While she’s still not at her ideal weight, the pounds she lost have stayed off. She works out, including weightlifting, and has started eating more whole foods, cutting processed foods from her diet.

Her biggest supporter, she said, is her husband, who has made changes in solidarity. She used to be a night owl, but both of them now head to bed at 10 p.m.

Put a pin in the ‘eat, pray, love’ fantasy

Andrea Leigh Rogers, a fitness trainer who has worked with celebrities like Gisele Bündchen and Nicole Scherzinger and has written a new book, “Small Moves, Big Life,” urges people trying to achieve a healthier lifestyle: Don’t fall for whatever wellness trend is making the rounds.

“There’s the game of comparison. I don’t look like her. I can’t do that if I don’t look like her. Other barriers also feel heavy, like I have to pay $50 to do one class,” she said.

You don’t. What you do need is to be consistent. That might mean mindful breathing, followed by a few minutes of stretching and a 10-minute workout in the morning. Or it could be a new approach to breakfast, or a rethink on the crush of daily responsibilities.

“We all have 10 minutes,” Rogers said. A good plan, she added, follows the acronym FEEL: “It’s fast, it’s enjoyable, it’s effective and there’s longevity.”

Sometimes, a reboot is needed

James Keppel, in Fort Collins, Colorado, nearly lost his liver to cirrhosis. That was in 2019. His first order of business was to get sober, which he did through rehab. Then, he worked on becoming healthier overall by making a series of nutritional and other life changes.

But a series of devastating developments, including a split with his wife and the premature loss of a close family member, left him floored. He sold his design company and turned to his sister for help, moving in with her and her family in Pennsylvania for nearly a year. He had to turn off the go-go rhythm of his old life.

“I slept a whole lot. I watched a lot of TV. I read a lot of books. I stayed off my computer. I didn’t take many phone calls,” he said. “I just slowly kind of ramped back up. You have to give yourself the space to get better.”