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Week: 01 Module: Mindset Subject: Ready, Willing & Able

Welcome!

Welcome to the First13 Program.

From week to week you will improve your health by mastering topics from 4 key areas:

Mindset
Lifestyle
Food & You
Exercise

In this first module from the “Mindset” category we’ll help you get ready to take on one of life’s biggest challenges – improving your health.

Creating successful, long-lasting healthy change results from implementing positive choices and actions day after day.

Let’s take this opportunity to set ourselves up for success by identifying any potential barriers to making healthy choices.

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There are four important components that contribute to a healthy lifestyle:

eating well
connection and enjoyment
moving daily
recharging

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How you know it’s an issue for you:

You feel alone
You think you can’t cook
You don’t like veggies and salads
You keep setting unrealistic goals and can’t achieve them
‘Everyone else’ whether at home or at work makes it too hard for you to change
You’re too busy or stressed to focus on your health
A negative voice keeps telling you that ‘you can’t’
You’re not a planner or are constantly disorganised
You don’t feel like you’re in the right frame of mind
Making positive healthy changes feels too hard
You don’t have a reason driving you to make healthy changes
You don’t have any nutrition or exercise knowledge

The good news is that we will help you identify what’s holding you back and get you to explore tips, strategies and answers that will directly help you to handle them.

Relevant Modules
The following modules are relevant to this one.

W02 – F&Y – Meals & Planning
W03 – F&Y – A Well-Balanced Diet
W05 – M – Practising Mindfulness
W10 – M – Goal Setting
W11 – L – Establishing a Healthy Routine
W11 – M – Building Resilience

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Concepts We’ll Cover

Barrier: Anything that prevents you from preparing healthy meals, exercising and generally improving your health.

Enabler: A positive enabler is an action or strategy used to overcome a barrier.

Social Isolation: The state of having minimal contact with others (Peplau & Perlman, 1982).

Loneliness: A feeling of being lonely that may or may not be related to social isolation (Hawthorne, 2006).

Stress: A natural human response to challenging or dangerous situations that can outweigh our ability to cope if we don’t have strategies to manage it.

Fixed mindset: Person believes that their character, intelligence and abilities cannot be changed.

Growth mindset: Person believes that their talents can be developed through hard work, willingness, good strategies and input from others

Motivation: Understanding what is important to you and why you want to improve.

Food skills: The information, abilities, and practices to acquire nutritious foods and prepare meals and snacks that are safe, nutritious, and culturally acceptable

The stages of change model: A theory, often shown as a flow diagram, that helps us understand how we can make positive behavioural changes.

The Evidence and Details

Barriers to Healthy Eating and Exercising

The barriers that stand between us and taking positive action to improve our health can come from within (internal barriers) or from our external environment (external barriers).

If we identify personal internal and external barriers to healthy eating and exercising, we can plan solutions (enablers) to help overcome them and achieve success.

The model below explores some of the common barriers/enablers to healthy eating and exercise.

Figure 2. Barriers and enablers to living a healthy lifestyle.

Feel free to write down or circle any barriers or enablers that resonate with you from the above diagram.

Five Common Internal Barriers

Loneliness and social isolation

Half of Australians feel lonely at least 1 day per week according to a recent national survey (Relationships Australia, 2018).

When we’re lonely, we’re more likely to move from ‘creation’ mode to ‘consumption’ mode. We overconsume foods, drinks and entertainment that will give us a quick fix and ease the discomfort of loneliness for a while, such as chocolate, crisps, takeaway foods, soft drink, alcohol, Netflix, TV, computer games and gaming apps (Holt-Lunstad et al. 2015; Hawthorne 2006; Australian Psychological Society 2018; Relationships Australia 2018; Schumaker et al. 1993; Shankar et al. 2015).

These unhealthy habits do not address the root cause of our loneliness, and over time will lead to physical health problems such as high blood glucose, high blood pressure, poor immune function, and may result in chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, and some forms of cancer (Holt-Lunstad et al. 2015).

*maybe change the obesity image

Figure 3. Being lonely or socially isolated is equally as harmful to our physical and mental health as smoking or having an alcohol problem, and twice as harmful as obesity (Holt-Lunstad et al. 2015).

Loneliness is not always an obvious driver for behaviour, so how can we recognise the signs?

There’s a big difference between being lonely and alone. We are inclined to retreat into hermit mode at the end of a busy day, or after a string of social events. It’s normal to need some time out to “recharge the batteries”. It’s when we feel disconnected from others whether we are alone or with company, that becomes a cause for concern.

When that feeling of disconnection persists for weeks and months, our mood can be negatively affected and we may lose interest in the things that normally excite us. We might dwell on the past, retreat to the couch and TV and neglect our health, well-being and even our hygiene. These together with the factors shown in the image below are all signals that we need to address loneliness.

It may feel overwhelming to think about meeting new people or reaching out to friends and family, but there’s no need to throw a party and invite everyone we know. We can achieve connection through taking small, manageable steps, such as joining an online platform like the First13 community forums and simply introducing ourselves.

There are a number of actions we can take to experience a sense of belonging and connection, no matter our circumstances – we’ll walk you through some ideas in the plan.

2. Mindset

Stanford Psychologist Carol Dweck’s research demonstrates that a person’s belief system can determine their success. She identified two belief systems: the fixed mindset and the growth mindset (Dweck, 2016).

A person with a fixed mindset believes their character, intelligence and abilities are fixed and cannot be changed. A person with a growth mindset believes their talents can be developed through hard work, willingness, good strategies and input from others.

Figure 5. Two mindsets (adapted from Carol S. Dweck’s & Nigel Holmes’ Two Mindsets)

Through adopting a growth mindset we will:

View challenges and difficulties as opportunities
Embrace growth over speed
Look at failure as lessons and learnings
Enjoy the journey and not just the results
Become more resilient, bouncing back from setbacks

Developing a growth mindset takes:

Persistence, practice and willingness to change
Accepting there is a need to change and scope for improvement
A positive attitude and faith (Dweck, 2016)

We’ll cover some steps that you can take to achieve a growth mindset in the plan.

We’ll help you embrace a growth mindset by moving you through the Stages of Change model.

Getting ready to change

We can assess our readiness to change by using The Stages of Change model. This model, pictured below, outlines the stages that we go through when we are making behavioural changes. It’s made up of 5 stages including:

Precontemplation
Contemplation
Preparation
Action
Maintenance

(DiClemente and Prochaska, 1998).

We are always at one of the 5 stages, and depending on our actions, we either progress on to the next stage, or we will relapse back to the previous stage.

It’s perfectly normal to have forwards/backwards motions whilst we are learning something new, until it becomes a behaviour that feels natural and automatic to us.

Figure 7. Stages of Change model adapted from DiClemente and Prochaska, 1998

By identifying where we are in the Stages of Change model, we learn our readiness to change and are then able to see what is required to keep moving towards taking action, followed by maintenance.

Time management & organisation

Being too busy, time poor or disorganised are major barriers to shopping for and preparing healthy food. Family commitments, competing priorities, working long hours and long commutes can all lead to relying on ready-made or takeaway options.

Thinking we don’t have enough time to eat well and exercise means that we may have issues with time management and getting organised. Like with improving any other skill, improving your relationship to time and organisation just takes a bit of practise and getting used to.

Our health lays the foundation for anything we want to achieve in life. And deserves to be prioritised.

We need to start asking ourselves why we’re not making our health a priority. It might be that we don’t feel worthy of nourishment or physical activity, or because we think that someone else in our lives comes first – children or a partner perhaps.

We’ll give you some tips and strategies to get you started on improving your prioritisation, time management and organisational skills in the plan.

Energy, motivation, mood & stress

We are all prone to low motivation and mood some days. It’s the nature of being human. But imagine if a surgeon wasn’t really “feeling in the mood” to perform life-saving surgery. Or if we relied on being motivated and in a good mood to get us to the moon. The turbulent nature of our motivations and emotions shows us that we need something solid and stable to fall back on to when mood and motivation inevitably dip.

In this module’s plan and worksheet, we’ll help you manage your motivation issues by finding your ‘why’ and we’ll show you how to assess and manage your stress levels which may be impacting on your success.

We’ll cover the other drivers of behaviour in much greater detail, and how you can achieve them, over the coming weeks.

Food knowledge and skills

We all understand that healthy eating leads to better health outcomes, yet this does not translate into our daily choices and practices.

If we delve a little deeper into why this is, we find a very complex and confusing food environment and low confidence in consumers to make healthy choices due to a lack of food knowledge and skills, such as:

Meal Planning
Food shopping
Food Budgeting
Meal preparation

And these are key components of translating nutrition knowledge into practice (Contento 2007).

The First13 program is here to give you the knowledge and skills necessary to navigate these environments in a way that results in healthful food choices.

So, if you didn’t develop your food skill set and knowledge at home or in school, now is your golden opportunity.

Despite what the cooking shows tell us, real, healthy eating doesn’t start with a fancy frying pan in the kitchen and each ingredient laid out ready for us. Cooking is important but it’s actually only the final step.

The essential (earlier) components of planning and preparing a healthy meal plan are broken down in the diagram below and we’ll explore each concept further in the plan:

Figure 6. The components of a healthy eating plan

In the plan we will walk you through exactly what you need to do to improve the quality of your food intake.

Then next week, we will walk you through meal planning and food budgeting, as well as help you navigate the supermarket, green grocer, fishmonger, health food store and farmer’s market.

Soon you’ll be in the habit of making healthy, tasty meals with fresh, local ingredients and walking off the stress of your day.

Other Barriers to Healthy Eating and Exercising

There may be other barriers holding you back from taking steps to improve your dietary and exercise habits. It’s important that you identify these as they come up and try to address them yourself, or seek guidance for managing them. Keeping a journal to log any obstacles that come up for you is a good way to identify and manage these.

External barriers, or barriers that come from outside of us, and their solutions, will be covered in more detail at the end of the plan in a table.

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We all experience obstacles when trying to make healthy lifestyle changes. What’s important to remember is this: the obstacle is the opportunity. When we adjust our self-awareness and embrace the challenge of developing solutions to our barriers, we arm ourselves with the ability to overcome them.

The sooner we realise that we all experience obstacles along the pathway to better health, such as periods of organisation versus disorganisation, feelings of time pressure, stress or low mood, and that we are all in this together, your self-awareness will increase and you will embrace the challenge of coming up with enablers to your barriers, remembering that the obstacle is your way forward

Visualise it

Whether or not you can do anything depends, a lot, on the way that you look at it. So, how are you looking at your barriers right now? Do they feel like climbing a mountain or a mole-hill? Is it an obstacle or an opportunity? What do you think you need to move forward?

A lot of our barriers only hold power because of the way that we think about them. If we can visualise overcoming them, then we will.

Here is an example of thinking through the process of challenging one of the most common barriers to healthy eating: a fixed mindset.

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The Plan

Building and maintaining social connections

No matter what the driver for loneliness is, there are clear, actionable steps you can take to improve your situation. We’ll walk you through some options to get you started.

Check in with a friend or family member daily.
Schedule time for social connection. You might like to keep a social calendar and arrange a social event with 1 or 2 friends once per week.
If you’re unemployed, look for work or volunteering opportunities.
Sign up for a gym, pool, sports, club or hobby membership.
Join a face-to-face or online support group like the food.com.au First13 forum.
Adopt a pet or take the neighbour’s dog for a walk.
Check in with a GP or another mental health practitioner and find out about your pathway forward to manage depression and anxiety if these are contributing factors.

Shifting a fixed mindset to a growth mindset

You are never too old or too anything to learn something new or take on a challenge. We’ll talk you through some clear steps to help you develop a growth mindset below.

Think of learning something new as teaching your inner child.
Actively seek out new learning opportunities.
Embrace mistakes as an important part of the learning process.
Be prepared to do the work. If you really want something, you’ll work for it.
Reward efforts and actions such as sticking with or improving at something, even though it’s uncomfortable, rather than traits such as intelligence or efficiency.
Choose learning well over learning fast.
You don’t know what you don’t know. Try doing a bit of your own research first, but if you can’t find answers, don’t be afraid to ask some questions.
Use constructive criticism from others to support your learning, rather than be negatively affected by it.
Reflect on your learning. Keep a journal of your daily or weekly learnings. Take the opportunity to expand on the food.com.au self-reflection worksheets. The more often you write, the more you’ll learn about yourself.
Don’t give up just because you haven’t witnessed a change yet. You will see a change if you keep at it.
Identify where you’re currently at on your journey to better health, by using the Stages of Change model. Take the necessary steps to move through the stages, towards taking action and maintaining a healthy lifestyle. The fact that you are here commencing the First13 program means that you are at least contemplating changing your health behaviours, so congratulations!

This table can help you to identify where you are currently at in the Stages of Change, and will help get you to the next stage and towards taking positive action for your health.

Table 1. The Stages of Change Characteristics and Strategies

Stage of Change	How we know we are at this stage of change	What to do to get us to the next stage of change
Precontemplation	Not considering change. In denial about the existence or seriousness of health problems. Given up on change due to unsuccessful past attempts.	Learn about the risks of not taking action versus the benefits that will come with positive changes in your health.
Contemplation	Mixed feelings towards taking action. Weigh benefits versus costs or barriers (e.g., time, expense, bother, fear).	Identify barriers and misconceptions. Ask questions or do some research. Tap into support networks.
Preparation	Prepared to experiment with small changes.	Develop realistic goals and a timeline for change.
Action	Take definitive action to change behavior.	Continue developing and amending goals and timeline for change.
Maintenance	We strive to maintain the new behavior over the long term	Continue tapping into support networks.

Adapted from Zimmerman et al., 2000; Tabor and Lopez, 2004

Once we are moving towards the preparation stage, we’re doing things like planning and scheduling in parts of the process of meal planning and exercising. We are taking steps to improve our food knowledge and skills, such as researching a recipe, writing a shopping list, a meal plan, going food shopping and having a crack at cooking a meal.

3.Getting organised

The solutions to being disorganised or too busy are the same – the 3 P’s: prioritise, plan and prepare.

Prioritising

Write down a list of your priorities and order them from most important to least. Health should ideally be your number one. If you prioritise being the best version of yourself then you have more to give to those around you (family, friends, colleagues).

Planning

Daily, weekly and monthly scheduling of your eating and exercise regime will help you achieve your health goals.

Options for planning your meals include using a diary, weekly or monthly calendar. You’ll find a meal planning template next week in the Meals & Planning worksheet to help you with this. You can also use the food.com.au website to browse a wide selection of healthy recipes.

Preparing

We have developed some resources to help you prepare healthy meals which you’ll find throughout the program, especially in Meals & Planning next week.

4.Managing your energy, motivation and stress levels

If your motivation and mood are low, and stress levels are high, you may need to prioritise your time for sleep, relaxation and exercise:

Listen to an audiobook, podcast or some music
Drink plain water or herbal tea instead of caffeinated beverages
Limit alcohol by having no more than 2 standard drinks per day and 2 alcohol free days per week
Avoid nicotine and sign up to a Quit program if you smoke
Pull on your sneakers, put in your headphones and walk your stress off
Aim for 7-9 hours of quality sleep every night so you are recharged for the next day
Open up the conversation of addressing your stress levels with a loved one
Practise mindfulness or meditation to help cope with everyday stress
Purchase a notebook and keep a journal of your thoughts and feelings
Keep a diary or calendar and manage your time better

Remind yourself of the motivational reasons for healthy eating and exercising:

Reducing time spent and frequency of being sick (eg. with colds and flus)
Feeling more mentally alert, positive and compassionate
Enjoying a longer lifespan
Improving self-esteem, confidence and boosting creativity
Developing better self-control around food which flows into other areas
Having the energy to play or engage more with kids or grandkids

We will help you assess and manage your energy and stress levels in one of the worksheets for this module.

5.Acquiring food knowledge and skills

If knowledge is your main barrier, or a barrier at all for you, rest assured because in the First13 program we will help you:

Develop your food knowledge through learning about macronutrients, micronutrients, and the relationship between nutrition and health.
Develop an overview of how you will create your own meal plan, write a grocery shopping list, meal prep, food budget, cook and store food.
Learn about the 5 core food groups that make up a well-balanced diet.
Understand healthy portion sizes.
Learn the health benefits of fruits and vegetables.
Identify your eating style and understand how it can help or hinder the process of establishing healthy eating habits.
Improve your awareness of your relationship to food, your body and self-esteem.
Practise smart snacking.

That’s internal barriers covered. We’ve also come up with a list of strategies to help us handle external barriers, such as the cost of food and the obesogenic environment in the table below.

External or Environmental Barriers (Physical, Social, Economical, Geographical)

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Welcome!

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Concepts We’ll Cover

The Evidence and Details

Five Common Internal Barriers

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Visualise it

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The Plan

Join Our Community

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