Do Something!

There is a whole raft of information out there. We know what we should be eating. We know that we should be exercising. But for one reason or another a large swathe of the population neither eats ‘right’ or does enough exercise. Or they think that by doing some exercise they can have “cheat days” and eat whatever they like.

What is it that is going on?

The UK government and the National Health Service, have run a series of initiatives over the years to try and get the population healthier. In 2021 the government released a framework of evidence to guide healthcare professionals in preventing illness, protecting health and promoting wellbeing, called ‘All Our Health’. In the guidance notes for why physical activity should be promoted there are a range of facts and figures that make bleak reading, including: 

• Physical inactivity is associated with 1 in 6 deaths in the UK and is estimated to cost the UK £7.4 billion annually (including £0.9 billion to the NHS alone).

• Our population is around 20% less active than in the 1960s. If current trends continue, it will be 35% less active by 2030.

• 34% of men and 42% of women are not active enough for good health.

The guide goes on to state that, “Many people don’t realise that physical activity has significant benefits for health, both physical and mental, and can help to prevent and manage over 20 chronic conditions and diseases, including some cancers, heart disease, type 2 diabetes and depression.”

The UK Chief Medical Officers’ Guidelines recommend each week adults do:

• at least 150 minutes moderate intensity activity, 75 minutes’ vigorous activity, or a mixture of both

• strengthening activities on two days

• reducing extended periods of sitting

All this information is readily available to the population and healthcare professionals are meant to be advising all and sundry on being healthier. There are also government guidelines for eating. And while I think the physical activity recommendations are great, the nutritional ones are less so. The next newsletter will delve deeper into the nutritional advice, but let’s look at the exercise recommendations and perhaps why they aren’t being adhered to.

It could well be that the concept of “being healthier” is too big or too amorphous for most of us to fully deal with, and the prospect of ill-health is too far off to bother with, until it sidles up to you and smacks you hard about the head.

Alan Deutschman explores this and more in his fascinating book, Change or Die. In it he looks at how facts rarely convince people to change their behaviours. The perceived wisdom is that people will act in their self interest if they have accurate information. And by informing and educating people they will then act on those facts. When that doesn’t work often the last resort is to use scare tactics, motivating change through fear. But people still won’t change their behaviour and carry on sabotaging their health.

Deutschman examined heart disease patients in the USA, and discovered that only an astonishing low 3% of them changed their long-term way of living after coronary surgery, meaning that within a few years the vast majority were often dead, despite being informed by their surgeons and doctors about what they had to do to prolong their lives.

Just like in that famous scene in the movie A Few Good Men when Jack Nicholson tells Tom Cruise, “You can’t handle the truth.”, the subconscious mind tries to protect the conscious mind from the enormity of the concept, be that ill-health or even death. People are in denial because they have confronted the facts and they can’t handle the facts, and the fear becomes overwhelming, so much so that our brains shut it out.

We also must not forget the power of peer pressure.

It can be really tough to make changes to your lifestyle if those closest to you aren’t changing the way they do things too. We are tribal beings, and we will do what we have to do to be accepted by our ‘tribe’, even if that means going against what we know to be the ‘correct’ way of living. 

The Asch experiment from the early 1950s revealed the degree to which a person’s own opinions are influenced by those of a group. Asch found that people were willing to ignore reality and give an incorrect answer in order to conform to the rest of the group.

So if someone wants to become healthier and get more exercise, but no one in their family or peer group is doing the same, the motivation for change will diminish very quickly. 

Tony Robbins may be correct in exhorting people to take action in the quote at the top of this newsletter. Action is where change happens. However, that action will be short lived unless there is understanding from within the peer group as well as support and guidance from those helping with changing the lifestyle to be healthier. 

That support has to make any changes accessible to the person wanting to change. Those changes are usually best if they are also small to begin with to allow for further change later on. Celebrating small wins is crucial for change as those celebrations will help reinforce the direction of travel in the person’s mind. I love celebrating every small win with my clients (some are lucky enough to have seen the ‘Happy Coach Dance’!).

If you know that you’d like to make changes to your lifestyle to try and be healthier, please don’t let fear of change hold you back, despite all those statistics. And please allow me to help you make changes that will help. I want to help. 

If you’d like a chat about changing your lifestyle for the better, click the gold button below, and let’s get you started on the road to better health.