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Your Best Health: Adult Weight Management

How ready are you for change?

Being ready

Commitment has to come from within ourselves. Sometimes people will say they’re ready or motivated to make a change when they really aren’t. This can happen for many different reasons. When deciding if you’re ready to make a change, it can be important to ask yourself:

  • Is this a change that I want to make or is it really because someone else wants me to make the change?
  • Am I really ready to make this change and do something differently, or is it really that I just want the results?
  • Is this change something I want to do or is it something I think should do but don’t want to?

Something to think about ...

To find out how ready you are for change it can help to think about the questions below. Go to your reflection journal and write out some of your thoughts.

  • Do I see my weight as a problem?
  • Does my weight worry or upset me?
  • Am I really interested in making changes to help my health and lifestyle?
  • Given everything I have going on in my life, am I ready to make a change now?
  • Do I believe I have all the information I need to make these changes? If not, go to these resources to find out what help is available.

There may be some things you’re not ready to do yet—that’s OK. Focus on the changes that you are ready to make. For the changes you aren’t ready for, think about and keep learning about what might be needed to make these changes worthwhile for you.

It’s natural to have more than 1 priority in your life. You may find that you need to take care of something else first. Talk to your healthcare provider about what you can do.

Being confident

Sometimes being ready to make a change is affected by how confident you feel. In other words, if you feel like you’ve failed in the past when you tried to make some healthy changes, you may think “why bother trying again?”

Think about what happened before in a different way. It wasn’t you that failed. It was the plan that failed.

How we set goals, plan, and solve problems or get past things that get in our way, can increase our chance of success. Take a minute to think about this.

Now ask yourself again, how ready are you to make a change?​​