Friday 2 March 2012

How to Use a Kaizen Approach to Great Health

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AppId is over the quota

In this article I'm going to explain what Kaizen is. Then I'll show you how to apply a Kaizen approach to getting great health, energy and fitness and feeling and looking fabulous.

So what is Kaizen? Kaizen is a Japanese word meaning improvement, a change for the better. Specifically Kaizen is about using small steps to achieve major changes and improvements. It's an approach that has been used for years by companies like Toyota to maximise efficiency and profits and minimise problems and faults. The opposite technique is innovation which is to take big steps to achieve the same changes. In terms of your health and well-being, most diets are based on innovation - making immediate and large changes to your habits.

Using a Kaizen approach to achieving your desired level of health involves starting with small, barely noticeable changes. This is successful because it does not result in the usual resistance to change. For example, compare deciding to eliminate chocolate from your diet completely starting today with removing a small piece of the chocolate bar and throwing it away and then eating the rest, then when you've got used to that increasing the amount you throw away until you no longer have the desire to eat chocolate on a regular basis. Which would you find easiest to do? Whenever we try to make big changes it requires a lot of effort and willpower to keep going in the initial stages and most people don't stick it out long enough to break through into the stage when it because much easier. The Kaizen approach avoids all that struggle and the changes seem almost ridiculously easy and so you are so much more likely to keep them up.

So decide what long term healthy habits you want to adopt and then break them down into medium term steps and continue to break them down until you have something really easy to do to start with. Don't be in too much of a hurry to increase the steps until the first step has become pretty much automatic - this approach does require patience. We'd all like results overnight but we know realistically this isn't feasible and certainly not sustainable. Also consider how long you have spent to date working on losing weight, getting fit, etc without lasting success. Would it not be better to take a year or two to work up to the healthy lifestyle you want and have confidence that it would last you a lifetime?

By the way do you want more information about getting healthy if so download my brand new free ebook, Dawn's Top 7 Myths of Health and Weight Loss here: http://www.healthyhabits4life.co.uk/


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