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If you have made it this far, I want you to congratulate yourself. It’s not easy staying true to your plan the way you have. It’s consistently shown that many people tend to start off the new activities with a new-found zest for healthy living, devoting themselves to proper nutrition and frequent exercising.

However, it’s another thing altogether to stick to your declaration for real. Many people tend to drop off or give up, after the first week or so. For you to be here – I want you to be proud of yourself for doing this. If you ask me, I’m very proud of you.

Now, many of us have times when we fall off-track in our healthy living plan. I’m no exception. There have been so many times in the past when I detract from my ideal regime, because of emotional eating issues, other priorities in life coming to a forefront, distractions, lack of availability of my desired food, poor planning, and so on. It’s normal to get off the wagon – the most important thing is you understand what went wrong, then get back right on it after that.

This week’s task is to identify your healthy living pitfalls, understand them, and identify steps to address them, so they don’t recur. Are you ready? Here we go!

Step 1 – Identify past incidences when you went off-track

Write down the past 5-7 incidences when you went off-track in your healthy living plan. It could before 21NLS – from as long as several years ago, to several weeks to, to even something that happened in the past 10 weeks, while you are doing 21NLS.

If you can think of more than 5-7 incidences, that’s even better. Basically, the more incidences/examples to reference to, the better. If you ask me to list down times when I fell off-track in my diet/healthy living plan, I can easily list several separate incidences. This also makes it easy for me to do the next 2 steps (and subsequently address my pitfalls).

Step 2 – Pick your top 3 pitfalls to healthy living

Now, look through those incidences you just wrote. See if there are any commonalities across these incidences. Group the ones that seem similar together – i.e. those that have a similar cause.

What would you say are your 3 biggest pitfalls to healthy living? Write them down.

Here are the most common healthy living pitfalls people have:

• Emotional eating
• Poor planning
• Lack of time to exercise
• No opportunities to exercise (i.e. bad weather, no nearby gyms, being busy with work, etc)
• Lack of healthy food options around you
• Prioritising work over health
• Unhealthy influences from friends and family, as they do not eat/live healthily
• Travelling too much

Step 3 – Identify steps to address your healthy living pitfalls

Now, for each of the 3 healthy living pitfall, you identified in Step 2, write down your key action steps to tackle this pitfall.

For example, if your pitfall is that you have unhealthy influences from friends/family, your action plan may look like this:

1. Look for friends who share similar interests in eating/exercising right
2. Find accountability buddies among these friends. Stick to them.
3. Join communities where you can be around like-minded people, such as PE Forums and its 21NLS challenge
4. Make a commitment to engage in these communities often, in getting the best of what they have to offer

Are You Still Here? Fall In!

For those who are still here with us, fall in here! Reply to this thread to let us know how you find the challenge so far, what task you’re working on at the moment, and how your 21-WEEKS-HEALTH CHALLENGE PLAN is coming along.

Once you are done for the week, update your 21NLS Journal. If you are working with a group of friends, keep posting what you are doing, to encourage and motivate
If you have any questions specific to this week’s task, Please ask Neem.

“If you want to get something you have never gotten before, you’ve to do something you’ve never done before.”