Hello and welcome to the lifestyle medicine series at Hometown Family Health. We will connect through different topics that will allow us to reflect on how we might apply new ideas, thoughts, or lifestyle medicine research to our current state of health in hopes of making improvements or shifts in our physical, mental, and emotional well-being.
If you’re new to our practice or simply exploring ways to create healthier daily habits, take a moment to view our Direct Primary Care Service Offerings to see how we support your journey to whole-person wellness.
I’m Rochelle Palmiscno, MD, and I’m new here. I have a love for lifestyle medicine, which means I love helping other people find ways to improve their day-to-day habits and routines to raise their level of wellness. I’m also a mom of two rapidly growing children and have a husband who is an engineer and a runner. My closest friends are also very skilled, endurance runners. I, however, am not a runner. But, for many years I kept telling myself, MAYBE, I could be a runner or at least try. I’ve done this many times over the past few years where I start and stop with my efforts to try running as a form of exercise.
Last fall was one of those times I decided to try. I wanted to show my kids that I can do something that is hard for me, try at something I am not inherently good at, and show up for myself in taking care of my body and my health. One way to be more successful in making behavior changes is to link your desired change with a value that is important to you. This helps remind ourselves of the bigger picture and what is important to us.
So, I started with my value of perseverance in mind. I gave myself some grace with a very slow ramp up from mostly walking to walk/jog to jogging a full mile and then more. I didn’t know what each workout would bring, but I made the decision to show up to each workout and not miss one. I never mentally committed to running a longer distance after I could run one mile. I told myself, “I can run for four songs and then take a break,” and that was enough to get me out the door and started. I almost always took a break after the first four songs, but found as I went on that I could restart my jog/run and do more on most days.
So, after four months of just deciding to show up each day and ask my body what it needed and what it could do for me that day, it was race day! I signed up for a race just to give myself a deadline of seeing how much I could do, but not actually how fast I could do it. My original goal was to be able to run 2 miles out of the 4-mile race. Because of the consistency of showing up to every workout, I was able to run the first 2 miles without a walking break, then took a short break before continuing. In the end, I finished with a total distance ran of 3.75 miles out of the 4 miles! For some people, this may be their warmup for their longer workout, but it was a huge accomplishment for me.
The only way I was able to achieve this was by creating a system that made it easy for me to show up consistently for myself.
If you’re looking to build healthier systems in your own life, our Lifestyle Services are designed to help you create sustainable routines that support movement, nutrition, stress reduction, and restorative rest.
If we have consistency between our goals and values, it will be easier to show up for ourselves as there is agreement with our intentions and actions. My goal was to “run” in a race that was longer than I have ran continuously before. My value was perseverance: I can do hard things. By linking my value of perseverance to my intended behavior changes, I was able to make a consistent decision to press start on my Garmin three days a week for four months and be proud of my outcome.
We can make amazing behavior changes when we do so without contradicting the person we are trying to become—in other words, making decisions and choices that are consistent with the person we want to become. James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, has many great quotes from his book, but these three stick out to me as it relates to making a commitment to being consistent for ourselves:
“Making a choice that is 1 percent better or 1 percent worse seems insignificant in the moment, but over the span of moments that make up a lifetime these choices determine the difference between who you are and who you could be. Success is the product of daily habits—not once-in-a-lifetime transformations.”
“Small habits, when repeated consistently, lead to remarkable results.”
“Focus on the process, and the outcomes will take care of themselves.”
Now, it’s your turn! What are you doing consistently for yourself or maybe for others that you feel good about? What are you thinking about starting or wishing to build into your routine more consistently? What value is important to you that you can link with your desired outcome? What small thing could you do 1% better tomorrow? This might be movement, caregiving for a child or an aging parent, stress management, recovery from substance use, reducing alcohol tobacco or caffeine, or sleep-related.
Leave us a comment below, or if you are an active patient at Hometown Family Health already, send your provider a message if you’d like to engage more in setting some goals and having support as you build consistency in your system. We are eager to walk beside you and watch your wellness grow!
If you’re not yet a patient and would like to connect with a provider who supports your long-term health journey, Book a Consultation today and let’s build consistency together.
