We don’t keep an estimated 80 percent of the New Year’s resolutions we make. But what if the person you want to change come Jan. 1 isn’t yourself? Many of us worry about unhealthy behaviors in a friend or loved one. John Sciacca, dean of health sciences at Cypress College, offers the following advice for helping a friend or relative adopt a better lifestyle.
- Don’t pressure or nag. Gently raise awareness on the problem and the benefits of change.
- Find ways to make healthy eating and exercise fun.
- Prepare tasty, low-fat meals.
- Listen to concerns and mixed feelings. Apologize if you’ve nagged or pressured in the past.
- Offer compliments and positive reinforcement.
Reader comments: We want this to be a place where people discuss and debate ideas that foster stronger communities. We expect people to differ -- judgment and opinion are subjective -- and we encourage free speech and the exchange of ideas. But you are participating in a community that is intended for all of our users and we prohibit profanity, vulgarity, racial, sexual and homophobic remarks, threats, harassment and personal attacks. Here's the full User Agreement. Thank you for making this a safe place worth preserving and sharing. Share this: The icons below make it easy to share this post with others. First icon e-mails a link.
Posted in: Fitness • New Year's resolutions |
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Both comments and pings are currently closed.
We don’t keep an estimated 80 percent of the New Year’s resolutions we make. But what if the person you want to change come Jan. 1 isn’t yourself? Many of us worry about unhealthy behaviors in a friend or loved one. John Sciacca, dean of health sciences at Cypress College, offers the following advice for helping a friend or relative adopt a better lifestyle.
[...] all kinds of filler news, along with retrospectives on the year past and speculations on the year to come, in anticipation of the likelihood that there will be no real news over the holidays. This year [...]
My NYR for one of my friends would be to quit saying, “I’m fat because of my wife’s cooking.”