Get a new you in 15 minutes

Dr Rangan Chatterjee’s fitness plan slots easily into the busiest of schedules. In the first of a three-part series, he explains how to make changes that will last

It never works, does it? That amazing healthy-lifestyle plan you swore you were going to stick to. That solemn resolution that you were going to exercise three times a week, eat wholesome food and lose that excess weight that’s been bothering you for years now.

It starts off well enough. You begin your new regime full of energy and optimism. You smash through the first day or two, beaming with pride, convinced you’ll be able to keep it up forever. But then it gets trickier. The novelty wears off. Life gets in the way.

You might last a week or two, maybe a month, perhaps even several months. But somehow, you always seem to find yourself back where you started again. So you beat yourself up. You didn’t have what it takes. You didn’t have the willpower. You just weren’t good enough. You failed.

Wrong. The very fact that the experience I’ve just described is so predictable should be the proof you need that the problem isn’t you. The majority of people who try diets and healthturnaround plans don’t make them stick.

As a busy GP, I’ve seen it time and time again – smart, tough and worried people struggling with the basics of living well and promising to do better. They would embark upon their latest health kicks full of sincere promises that this time they were going to change their habits for good, and then I’d inevitably see them in my surgery, a few months later, sad and ashamed of themselves, apologising for their failures.

But these patients have nothing whatsoever to be ashamed of. And neither do you. The fact is, most health plans are based on the common but incorrect assumption that you can make sweeping and lasting changes to your health by relying solely on willpower and motivation.

You’ve been promised you can simply decide to become a different person – a new, energetic, healthy, zingy, glowingly perfect version of you – and then become it. For the vast majority of us, this is just not true.

Most people who decide to change their lives using only willpower to get them through are pretty much doomed to fail. And the reason for that failure doesn’t lie in them but in the method itself. Sure, willpower and motivation are important to get you started, but in the long term they are rarely enough.

The proof is in the untold millions of sensible and determined people all over the world who have tried and tried and tried again, only to find themselves back where they started.

If this sounds like you, there’s no need to despair, because in your hands you have a plan that is finally going to help you. This plan will not only have you feeling better within days, it will also lead to meaningful and long-lasting change. My plan is easy to follow, easy to maintain and requires only the smallest amount of willpower.

Feel Better in 5 is a programme that has been tried and tested on my patients – busy people with busy lives, just like you. And it works so well because it has been created using the latest science on successful behaviour change and

because it understands that the vast majority of health problems that people suffer from today are rooted in our busy modern lifestyles.

It’s revolutionary because it will lead to noticeable change without demanding that you wake up tomorrow morning and magically become a completely new you. All it asks for is five minutes of your time, three times a day, five days a week.

Your life can be medicine

Before we rush head first into the details of the Feel Better in 5 method, let’s take a quick moment to understand why it is so effective. It is based on the simple fact that it is the way we choose to live, day in and day out, that mostly defines how healthy we end up being.

If we consistently make good choices, we’ll end up feeling well. If we repeatedly make bad ones, we’ll end up struggling and getting sick. This may sound so obvious it’s hardly worth saying at all, but it might surprise you to know that this is not how we currently look at health.

Imagine that you go to see your doctor, complaining of a headache. Your doctor will listen to you, describe your symptoms and give you a diagnosis based on what you’ve said. They may say you have a tension headache or a migraine. You’ll probably then be prescribed one or more medications to help you with your pain. This is how doctors are trained. It’s how I was trained.

Of course, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with giving you a pill to help reduce pain, but I believe a much better approach would be to try to figure out the root cause of your headache. For example, it might have been triggered by not drinking enough water, excess stress, a food intolerance, too much screen time, a neck problem or insufficient sleep.

A pill might be helpful in the short term, but in the long term we should be aiming to understand why you got your headache in the first place. This is the approach I’ve taken in Feel Better in 5. It recognises that, for most of us, the source of good health, as well as bad health, is our lifestyle. About 80 per cent of the problems I see as a GP are not caused by a glitch in our system that simply needs fixing.

Instead, they are usually a sign that something is wrong in my patient’s day-to-day activities. I’m not only talking about conditions

like type 2 diabetes and putting on excess weight, which many of us already recognise can be related to our lifestyles. Our modern way of life also plays a role in many other complaints, such as gut problems, mood issues, insomnia, low sex drive, poor concentration, hormonal complaints and high blood pressure.

Perhaps someone is making unhealthy food choices. Perhaps it’s related to stress. Perhaps there is a lack of close, nourishing relationships, or maybe there’s some depression or anxiety that needs to be dealt with, or a lack of exercise or good-quality sleep. Almost certainly it’s going to be more than one of these things and, more often than not, I find that it’s in making small adjustments to my patients’ lifestyles that the best cures can usually be found, rather than in a packet of pills.

This is the simple idea that lies at the heart of the Feel Better in 5 method. I’m going to ask you to introduce three simple and easy practices into your daily routine, five days each week. I call these practices “health snacks”. Each one of these health snacks will take no more than five minutes to complete. This is short enough for you to be able to fit into your busy day yet long enough to ensure that you gain real benefit from doing it.

Each health snack will focus on a different aspect of your health: mind, body and heart. Often we only focus on one area when trying to improve our health, which is why the benefits are usually short-lived. For example, let’s say you’re trying to reduce your sugar or alcohol intake. You may be initially successful while your motivation is high, but usually, after a week or two, you will have slipped back into your usual patterns. The reason you ate sugary foods and drank too much alcohol in the first place might have been to help you to manage and cope with the stress in your life.

If you don’t deal with the stress, you’ll never change the behaviour. This is why my Feel Better in 5 method helps you to tackle every aspect of your health.

By completing three short health snacks a day, you’ll quickly begin to feel happier, calmer and more energetic. You’ll become physically healthier and, if you are carrying excess weight, you will start to lose it.

Real change happens in just five minutes, three times a day, five days a week