Health and Fitness

Intro to Health/Wellness

These days, many individuals want to change their lifestyle practices in order to improve their health and well-being. Such changes typically involve improving one's diet, incorporating more physical activity into one's daily routine, and learning how to effectively manage stress. While many individuals can succeed in changing their lifestyle for a finite period of time, adopting healthy lifestyle practices for a lifetime is a much more difficult proposition.

While it is true that maintaining a healthy way of life is challenging, it is not impossible. The following tips will help set you up for success:

Know your current level of behavior.

The first step in changing your behavior is establishing your baseline. Is your idea of exercise walking from the sofa to the kitchen? Do you consider French fries and ketchup a serving each of a vegetable and fruit? Without knowing your current level of lifestyle practices, you will not be able to develop a realistic, achievable action plan for change. Taking the Stanford Health and Lifestyle Assessment and reading over the reports will help you gauge your current behavior.

Assess your "readiness for change."

It is not enough to know that you should eat more healthfully, or that you should be walking more. You have to truly be ready to commit to making the change. Adopting a healthy lifestyle is hard work—if it weren't, we all would be doing it! Because of this, if you are not ready to commit the time and energy to the behavior change process, you will likely not be successful. By taking Stanford Health and Lifestyle Assessment assessment, you will identify your readiness for change.

The Stanford Health and Lifestyle Assessment is designed to give you an idea how your current lifestyle may be affecting your health and well-being. The reports generated when you complete the assessment outline your personal risk for diseases such as type II diabetes and cardiovascular disease, and provide you with health behavior targets you can set for yourself to reduce your risk and improve your health. We encourage you to use these reports as a starting point for conversations with your health professional, family members, local YMCA, or other health and well-being partner about changes you might make in lifestyle habits to improve your overall health.