I discovered a statistic that 80% of the population wants to eat healthier but 90% of them don’t do it.

What inspires some people to make a change and be disciplined enough to stick with it, while others only give lip service to wanting to be healthy?

The latter group might say that they want to get healthy, but what they really want is “magic”. That kind of magic doesn’t exist, unfortunately.

Here at Root Cause Medical Clinic, we see many patients who have tried a multitude of ways to get healthy; sometimes we are their port of last resort. We delight in achieving excellent results, even with patients who have been suffering for decades. The patients who exhibit discipline are my favorite. Why? I know they will follow instructions. Their discipline translates into compliance, and with patient compliance, we typically get outstanding results.

We want to help everyone, of course, and I was thinking about that today particularly because a mother /daughter team that was desperately in need of help discontinued their care today. When I asked their treating doctor what happened, he stated that they were completely non-compliant. They would agree that his advice “sounded good” but when seeing them for follow-up visits, they would never have done what was recommended. They canceled and missed appointments and basically never started our program in earnest.

I was disappointed as I know how ill they both are, but it got me thinking if it was possible to turn an undisciplined patient into one who could improve and get benefit from care.

What follows are my ideas taken from thirty years of helping all types of patients through many adventures. I hope you find this useful. Perhaps you can share it with a friend or family member who needs assistance or perhaps it can help you. If it does help, please let me know what provided you the most benefit.

5 Tips to Get Inspired and Get Healthy!

1. Support – It’s important to have someone in your life that is supportive of your desire to get healthy. Having us or your clinician is great, but ideally, you’ll need a friend, co-worker, or family member whom you can talk to when you need some support. It’s very difficult to make it alone and almost impossible with zero support.

2. Friends and food – The converse of tip #1 above is that you need to spend less time with those people who embody or advocate unhealthy lifestyle habits. I’m not saying to avoid family or close friends altogether, but anyone who would discourage, overtly or covertly, your efforts to improve your health status, need to be present a bit less in your life, especially as you initially embark on your healthy journey.

If you think about it, it would be quite difficult to eat healthily with a “friend” who continually brings pizza and ice cream over to your house. The solution? Tell your friend that you’d appreciate spending time together in a different way. Whether it’s going shopping, taking a walk, or watching a movie, find an activity with this particular person that doesn’t involve food.

3. Internet inspiration – Download Instagram on your phone or computer. Look for and follow inspirational, healthy individuals. Believe me, there are many, many such people. Pictures of healthy food, exercise, and motivational quotes abound on Instagram. While a live human is best to support you, getting some inspiration from any source is excellent and you can easily find them on Instagram. You can follow me on Dr. Vikki’s Kitchen for healthy food and recipe ideas, but believe me, there are many, many such profiles. Of course, there are also junk food pictures, so please avoid those!

4. Exercise – Exercise first thing in the morning. It feels good to get moving first thing plus exercise stimulates the metabolism for the entire day when it’s done in the morning. It also produces endorphins, those feel-good chemicals that will set you up for a positive start on the day. When you’re feeling that “exercise high” you’ll be less likely to cheat!

5. Healthy Breakfast – Eat a very healthy breakfast, such as a green smoothie. Just like exercise, starting your day with a healthy, nutrient-packed breakfast will have you feeling energized and make you want to be “good” for the rest of the day. Unfortunately, the converse is also true. Starting your day with a bad breakfast (think sugar, white flour, caffeine, etc.) will have you craving all the wrong things, making it harder to get back on track.

Are these tips helpful? Please give them a try and let me know. There’s nothing I want more than to reverse the dwindling spiral of ill health that is plaguing our country. Both children and adults alike are becoming less and less healthy and developing diseases at younger ages.