Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
THE NEW YOU starts here!
One unhealthy habit can lead to a negative spiral that’s difficult to break. Our Wellness Journal is the best way to help you get control back
We’r e l iv i ng longer than ever, but what’s most important to all of us is that those extra years are full of joy and free of pain. We want to live long and well.
How can we ensure this? Well, the solution is unlikely to come in a pill or a bottle. You’re not going to find it in your GP practice or in the offices of a private specialist. Modern medicine is fantastic at managing a fairly small number of problems – some cancers, severe infections and injuries of all kinds. Vaccines save countless lives. But it’s not great at managing the problems that come from the way many of us are forced to live our lives in 21st- century Britain – common, life- limiting conditions such as type 2 diabetes, heart failure, lung disease and obesity.
These conditions are strongly linked to lifestyle: alcohol, long commutes, lack of time, stress, cigarettes, too much food and too little movement. And while your GP in particular is a fantastic resource, modern medicine is no substitute for living well.
Doctors prescribe drugs to manage what are effectively side effects of your lifestyle. Painkillers for knee pain, antidepressants for mood, tablets for blood pressure and cholesterol. But these drugs generally don’t deal with the root cause of most of the problems we face; they merely treat symptoms or limit damage.
Changing the most fundamental aspects of your lifestyle isn’t trivial. Most of us haven’t made a choice to let things slip, but we find ourselves in a negative spiral in which one problem makes the others even worse. Weight gain means that sleep deteriorates and that makes diet even harder to control and so on.
Many of us know what to do – cut down on alcohol and junk food, be more active – but interrupting the cycle is hard. We know this because despite being doctors, scientists and health communicators, the two of us are just as tempted to binge on food and TV, skipping sleep and exercise, as you are.
But you can get control back. The world around you doesn’t always make it easy, but the person most in charge of your health is you. Helping people take control over their destiny and live healthier for longer has been at the heart of all the TV programmes and series we have developed and presented over the last decade. But we admit
that quite often, we’re giving advice that’s hard to follow. All of us know exactly what we need to do to be healthy, but also why we sometimes fail. Too many choices, not enough motivation.
That’s why the two of us have teamed up with the Daily Mail to create this new Good Health For Life Wellness Journal, which will show you, in easy recordable steps over the next 28 days, how to change your lifestyle for the better. We all need someone to hold our hands – and that’s what this journal is designed to do. We’ve used the best evidence and our own experience to help create it. It will help you understand your motivations, allowing you to stay focused on challenges. And it will help you make those simple changes to your daily life and turn them into habits. That negative spiral will soon become a virtuous circle, each change making further positive change easier, giving you the best possible chance of a long, happy and healthy life.
We believe this journal can be a powerful tool for everyone, regardless of age, gender or health. Give us four weeks, it won’t be hard and the two of us plan to join you on this journey too. So why don’t we start right now?
LET’S GET STARTED
Look out for your copy of our Good Health For Life Wellness Journal inside today’s Weekend magazine. If you’ve missed it, or if you need extra copies for other members of your family, call 0330 100 0601.
With our help you can use the journal to work out your most important health goals, and then achieve them. As part of this, we will show you how to have a proper audit of the pills and supplements you consume and how to take a look at your family history, your sleep and activity levels. This will help you identify the most pressing problems as they affect you and to find ways to begin the process of solving them. You will find we have identified the main areas of life that many of us can most effectively improve: diet and weight, fitness and strength, pain and medication, mood, sleep and bad habits.
When you turn to the journal’s daily diary pages, you’ll find a checklist of boxes to fill in each day to help you monitor your progress in these areas. Some are recorded daily (such as the time you go to bed), some weekly (your weight and waist measurement). There are also other boxes to record important lifestyle improvements, such as increasing your fruit and vegetable
intake (see page 50), getting more and better sleep (see page 53) and finding time each day for five minutes to sit with your thoughts. We explain in detail how to use the daily diary in the panel on the right.
Feel free to adapt parts of your journal, modify the headings and cover it in notes and scribbles if you like. This is your journal and it needs to work for you. Getting properly interactive with it is the best way to
identify – and then change – any unhelpful habits that might have crept into your behaviour, empowering you to achieve your own health goals. Keeping tabs on what you do every day will allow you to set and achieve small targets that will become ingrained into your routine, and set you on your way to long-term beneficial behavioural changes that will transform your health and life.
We’ll show you how, at the end of each week, to stop and take stock of how much progress you’ve made. There’s a special place in the journal, at the end of each of the four weeks, to log that information.
Our ultimate aim is to help every reader of the Daily Mail to become engaged with their health, and in this companion guide to our Wellness Journal we will explain why every small step which can contribute to better health is a step worth taking.