Too often, people have the urge to shed old habits for new ones in an effort to reshape and reform their lifestyles for the better. Eating healthier, exercising, budgeting time and money are activities that are rarely satisfying, because we know they can always be done better.

Yet, when it comes time to make a commitment to making positive changes to your routines and habits, the realities of overhauling your current lifestyle set in. The abstract concepts of time and energy seem completely foreign to you. You’re left wondering where to begin to live healthier.

Where do you begin? How to create a new routine for healthy weight loss? How does creating a new routine work? These mysteries have long since been answered, while the average person still works diligently to apply the tenets of behavioral change to their lifestyles and harness its effects. In the process of creating real, long-lasting change, the Caterpilly program is the perfect aid to finding true happiness.

The mobile text-messaging program Caterpilly is based on the Transtheoretical Model of Change, a sociological theory created in 1983 by James O. Prochaska and Carlo Di Clemente, scholars at the University of Rhode Island. After tireless research into how habits are formed and why some habits stick and others don’t, these academics simplified the process of behavioral change into six steps: precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, maintenance and termination.

When you look at what each of these terms means, you can relate them to your everyday life and understand how this model clearly applies to integrating real change in your lifestyle.

Not Ready

Before you are ready to change, you are probably cruising through life on auto-pilot, acting instinctively to satisfy your needs in the moment, without too much foresight into the impacts your behaviors have on your life in the long run. After a while, you’ll begin to realize that your habits are unsustainable for living a healthy lifestyle.

In the precontemplation phase, or the ‘Not-Ready’ stage, you have yet to realize the impact your behaviors have on your mood or condition, including when some of your habits are problematic.

Getting Ready

Once you take a step back and look at how your behaviors influence the outcomes in your lifestyle, such as your physical appearance or energy levels, you begin to question whether or not your current behaviors are worthwhile.

For instance, if you spend much of your time on the computer or in front of the television, you’ll begin to ask yourself how the sedentary habits embedded in your daily routine are impacting your health. If you exercised more often, would you feel better about yourself? The answer is usually yes.

This is the time when you are weighing the consequences of your actions and beginning to assess how your life is better suited by altering your daily routine.

Ready

Invariably, you will identify behaviors in your daily routine that are better suited being done differently. Once you come to these realizations, you are forced to consider how you would institute a new set of behaviors to achieve better results.

The preparation stage is one of planning. As you would map out a driving route to take on a road trip or strategically pack a suitcase for a week-long vacation, this is the planning stage of the new, healthy lifestyle you envision embarking on in the coming weeks and months.

Action

The next step is to flip the proverbial script on your daily routine and enact the changes you know will lead to more fulfilling personal outcomes. This is where the process of making healthy changes in your lifestyle becomes tricky, because it requires you to step out of your comfort zone and have faith that the preparations you made are the right ones.

The fear of not knowing exactly how your life will be impacted can feel crippling at first. This feeling is a necessary product of taking risks and making meaningful changes. It takes a lot of courage and confidence to take meaningful action to make real change in your lifestyle.

You can count on this stage of new habit formation to not go exactly according to plan. Your willingness to fight through the challenges you face along the way will determine if you succeed in building a new, healthier routine.

Maintenance

You’ve probably heard stories of individuals who go on crash diets as a means of shedding unwanted weight fast, only to gain back those pounds shortly after they reach their target goal. This is the result of creating habits that are fine in the short-term, but are impractical or undesirable in the long-term.

Your efforts to create a healthier routine that is sustainable will be futile unless you can find joy in your new lifestyle. Constant reminders of how your actions now will lead to happiness later are integral in developing a mindset that allows you to maintain your new routine.

Termination

The final stage in the process of behavioral change is achieved in the familiarity you have with your new routine, the consistency with which you carry out your target actions, the certainty you have that this is the way you want to live your life and the comfortability you have with the new you. It is the point of no return, in the best way possible.

You can look back at your old habits with nostalgia, knowing that is how things used to be and how they will never be again. It’s a looking glass into the past, reminding you of why you chose to create real change in your lifestyle. It’s a benchmark to admire how much happier you are following the formation of your new routine than you were in what now feels like a distant memory.

How to Begin?

Just when you are readying yourself to take the leap of faith and make real changes to your lifestyle, the Caterpilly program is there to help make your transition to happiness as smooth as possible. The program allows you to monitor your fitness progress digitally and sends you inspirational messages to keep you motivated along the journey to a new you.

The beauty of the effective weight loss program is that you have complete control over how you’d like to utilize it. Click here to learn more about how the Caterpilly program works and to sign up today.

Have you been thinking about how to lose weight and keep it off? Caterpilly provides motivation and a supportive weight-loss program that focuses on healthy habit formation so that you can lose weight safely and keeping the weight off over time.

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