Get­ting healthy means dif­fer­ent things to dif­fer­ent peo­ple. For some, it means los­ing weight. For oth­ers, it involves eat­ing bet­ter, cut­ting out some guilty plea­sures, or just get­ting in shape. What­ever you hope to accom­plish, here are some tips to help you get there.

1) Iden­tify a man­age­able, high level objec­tive: If there are just one or two things about your health you would like to focus on improv­ing, then start there. If you have a bunch of stuff you want to “fix”, avoid the temp­ta­tion of try­ing to do it all at once. If you try to take on too much, you make the task at hand harder and your chance of suc­cess goes down. Once that hap­pens, you become demor­al­ized and demo­ti­vated and you will almost cer­tainly fail. “Lose weight” or “drink less soda” are exam­ples of man­age­able, high-level objectives.

2) Set achiev­able goals: Once you have decided what your objec­tive is, iden­tify achiev­able goals along the path to meet­ing your objec­tive. Make sure that your goals are eas­ily mea­sur­able, and that they are dis­creet (i.e., not prone to be influ­enced by other things). You will find some­thing like “lose 10 pounds” to be a much more work­able goal than “feel better”. If your objec­tive is very ambi­tious (e.g., lose 100 pounds) don’t make your goal be the entire objec­tive — being able to accom­plish a goal is very moti­vat­ing, so you should do what you can to lever­age that.

3) Track your progress: Keep tabs on how you are doing. If you use a prod­uct like Life­Topix, the Health + Activ­ity log­ging com­po­nent gives you an easy way to cap­ture the rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion you need to track all in the con­ve­nience of your hand­held device which is always at your side. It also gives you built-in graph­ing capa­bil­ity so you can see, at-a-glance, major trends. It even gives you the abil­ity to graph mul­ti­ple things together so you can spot cor­re­la­tions. No mat­ter what kind of progress you are mak­ing, use it for moti­va­tion. If you are not mak­ing the progress you had hoped for, use it to give you the kick you need. If you are mak­ing progress, use it to instill in you the desire to keep going.

4) Re-evaluate peri­od­i­cally: Set check­points along the way for when you will look at every­thing and do a sta­tus check includ­ing where you started and where you are now. Check to make sure every­thing still makes sense. If you had started with a weight-related objec­tive and then, later, found out about some med­ical con­di­tion that you have, then it may be advis­able to make an adjustment.

5) Reward your­self for suc­cess: If the end goal is not enough in its own right, then give your­self a reward for get­ting to where you wanted to go. If accom­plish­ing your objec­tive required deny­ing your­self some­thing that you really love, then have a lit­tle of what­ever that is. Or, if accom­plish­ing your objec­tive required hav­ing to do some­thing you really do not love, then take a hol­i­day from that for a day or a week, or reduce the inten­sity. Just resist the urge to go com­pletely off the wagon so that you can pre­vent from undo­ing all your hard work.