DAY 13
So recently I've been busy getting back into university life so haven't been posting for a while. I'd like to start again and have another goal to share. It started with an assignment for a pharmacy paper that I'm taking. It's called the behaviour change assignment and it's a project that lasts for a couple weeks. We are told to start a simple habit to help better ourselves. This is to put us into the position that our patients are in and be more empathetic and understanding about their strives to change. We get to experience how there is a degree of difficulty and determination needed. The assignment criteria are as follows:A brief (one page maximum) statement of
your goal
your current behaviour
why do you want to change
how do you plan to change your behaviour
how hard do you think it will be, what do you anticipate will be difficulties, facilitating factors
how you plan to get over difficulties
How will you unlearn the old behaviour?
How will you reward the new behaviour?
How will you address the barriers?
Here's my write up for that:
"My goal and behaviour that I want to develop is to have a healthy diet. This would improve my future health and reduce my weekly expenditure on food. A more personal reason for this goal is to avoid getting diabetes. My father has developed diabetes and made me see the reality of an unhealthy diet. It’s a very real disease that anyone can get if they’re not careful with their diet. To develop this habit, I would cook healthy and eat out less often. Habits take time to build momentum so I'm planning to start my first week with eating out less than 5 times. I would decrease this threshold as each week passes. I’ve counted and calculated that on average I eat out 6 or 7 times a week. Reducing it below 5 would be a significant change. Over the weeks I plan on reducing this number to 2 or 3. I consistently cook healthy meals at home so I will focus on eliminating the habit of eating out. I include 4 or more vegetables in each meal and have reduced my carbohydrate intake. Restaurants or takeaways in Dunedin rarely have nutritious and balanced meals. The places that do are very pricy. I would go broke before the end of this semester if I ate at those places consistently. Currently I find it difficult to resist eating out because of the limited time to go home and cook between lectures or labs. One other barrier to eating healthy is to resist junk food and sticking to the diet. It's just so easy to go out and grab some chips or Chinese take away. To develop my goal I'd pack meals for myself to stop myself from eating out. I would pay extra attention to the pharmacy timetable and watch out for the days that have one-hour lunch breaks. Another barrier is that I don't know many healthy food recipes so the food I cook is bland. I'd prefer eating out, but to develop my goal I would take the time and learn some new recipes. I would immerse myself in cooking to promote and facilitate this new identity. In addition I would apply a type of operant conditioning to punish bad behaviour and reward good behaviour. To increase my likelihood of cooking I would set aside $30 for each week that I successfully complete. It would be around a little less than half the average amount that I would’ve spent on eating out each week. I will give myself the option to save or spend this money on anything but eating out. As a punishment for not successfully completing the week I would need to do 30 minutes of cardio for each time I eat out. I find cardio really boring so this would be great punishment for me. This will be a challenging, but worthwhile experience and I hope I don’t relapse."
