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W ant to be slimmer, fitter and healthier? Don't think it's
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possible you could be dramatically healthier and more energetic in January than you are now.just by changing one small thing a week? Well, read on, because Commercial Motor is launching a personal health and fitness plan to guide you through 12 weeks of painless but important improvements.
During the past six months, CM's Health Challenge has had great success in raising awareness of health issues for transport workers among the public and government. But with this latest initiative you can join in wherever you are and whatever yourjob. Pall-Ex MD Hilary Devey says:"1 am delighted that Pall-Ex is sponsoring this initiative and helping Commercial Motor to raise the profile of health issues within the industry" The CM Online Health Challenge, run in association with Pall-Ex, is a simple and painless — but very effective — mechanism for changing bad, unhealthy habits into positive, energising ones.The programme lasts 12 weeks, and will cover different aspects of health, diet. exercise and weight loss.
The CM Health Challenge has never been about making huge swingeing changes to your lifestyle or your body. We believe that tiny, sustainable changes are the best and most effective way to improve health, weight and fitness. Evidence suggests that often those who leap into exercise programmes with a passion quickly slump back to doing nothing. Most of those who lose lots of weight on a diet plan have usually put it all back on within a year. Why? Because unless you change your habits a little at a time, you will simply revert to old ways of behaving.
Habits are hard to break because repetitive actions help form their own pathways in the brain.That's how we learn to drive,play the piano or kick a football without thinking but it's also the mechanism, along with blood and brain chemistry, which underlines our urge to have a cigarette, crave sweet foods or slump in front of the TV instead of getting up and out.
Feel-good hormones
The human body and mind likes payback it likes the things that make it feel good.And while many of the healthy things in life make us feel great, there are also lots of chemical short cuts which give us a boost the quick and dirty way. For instance exercise creates endorphins which make you feel pain-free, awake, light and cheerful. But if you're feeling down and not used to exercising, your body will crave fatty foods (doughnuts and chips) to compensate for the lack of endorphin. Similarly, if we lack serotonin, another feelgood hormone, we tend to crave sugar.
We all slide into unhealthy habits because when we started they were a quick way of making ourselves feel better. Of course, in the long run they don't work -and they are usually pretty destructive to your health. But once you've started, it's hard to stop because your body and mind are used to getting your feelgood factor from unnatural sources.
So, back to our habit-busting health plan. Go to the link www.continercial-motonconil myhealthchallenge this will take you to a registration page where you can fill in your details and follow some simple instructions for assessing your own health and fitness, whether you're a 200hp or a 400hp engine.
Then si.t back and wait.We will send you your weekly health challenge by e-mail with an explanation of how it will help you.There will also be a differentiator for those who find the task too easy although it's possible that even fitter individuals will find some tasks more difficult than others.
Try each task for the week and record your progress on the registration page. Keep going with as many tasks as you can,so that by the end of the 12 weeks you'll have a whole fleet of established new habitsand have lost a lot of bad ones.
In writing the Online Health Challenge we haven't decided for you what your goals should be.We have provided some selfassessment tools for you to use as a guide, but it is up to you whether losing weight, feeling fitter, or improving your diet is your priority. But whatever goals you want to achieve, the CM Online Health Challenge will help you get there.
The Online Health Challenge will finish in January, just in time for you to embrace your new year's resolutions already feeling fantastic. •