If you want to have a healthier and more sustainable diet it is important to plan how to reach this goal as Good goal setting is the key to success. But how to set good goals towards change? As a guide of our action, we can use the model of Proactive goal setting, which gives a nice frame to our acts and the tracking of our development (1).

Steps of goal setting:

1. Envisioning

As a first step of setting a goal, we need to envision the change we want to achieve or the goal we want to reach. As an example, let’s say that the goal is to eat more vegetables because right now our diet lacks them and it would mean a big improvement. It might even help more to picture the actual future event in our head as we are eating those lovely veggies and all the benefits we hope to get from this goal (eg.: having a healthier body or helping the environment). If you want to have a healthier body you can also imagine how it feels or if you are wishing to be more environmentally conscious you could imagine how it makes the world a better place and gives the Earth a breather. You want to keep these pictures and feelings in your mind while planning your actions and reaching towards your goal, as it can be a good motivator on the way.

2. Planning

When we have the exact goal in our mind the next step is to plan how to reach this envisioned future. The SMART goals model will serve as a guide for the planning process as it is easy to understand. Because of its structure, it is widely used and applied in various settings (2, 3).  The name of the model is made out of the five guiding principles:

To set a goal according to these guidelines we need to break down our envisioned future into more specific and trackable portions. I will use the previous example to introduce the planning process. The first thing is to make the goal of eating more vegetables more specific. If we set an amount and regularity to this goal it makes it more specific and measurable. In this case, the goal will be to eat vegetarian dishes for lunch 3 times a week. The creation of a schedule makes it more timed and measurable. Therefore it is useful to determine the specific days we want to eat these vegetarian dishes eg.: Monday, Wednesday and Friday. There is only one thing left to plan to make our goal even more achievable: where and how to get the food. We can decide to have a shopping day on Sunday when we buy the ingredients for the 3 vegetarian dishes and even determine where to buy them. Or we can look for a diner near to our working pace where they serve vegetarian dishes.

R for Relevant

At this point, there is only one letter of this acronym left “R” for relevant. This is a less practical but abstract part of the planning process as it refers to the motivational background of the goal. The goal is only reachable if it is relevant enough to take the energy to fight the throwbacks. The proactive motivation model (1) determines three aspects of the motivation that influences the achievability of a goal.

First is the reason, which is the easiest to analyse as it throws us back to the topic of envisioning, as what we imagined at the beginning is our reason to engage in the goal-setting process. In our example, it was the health or environmental benefit of eating more vegetables. Another component of our motivation is our self-efficacy, the belief of our abilities to reach the envisioned goal. This is a component that can not be neglected as can have a great influence on our success. It worth to think through what abilities we have and consider what kind of barriers might hold us back from reaching the final goal. For example, we might think that after the first week we would get bored of the variety of vegetarian food we eat, as we can only prepare a few, and this might even get us to the point of giving up on our goal. The solution for this situation can be to look for new recipes every week or to choose more different vegetarian diners where we can eat. This gets us to the next component, our energy and passion to reach the desired goal. It is important to have enough energy to fight throwbacks on the way and to be determined enough to keep up until the goal is reached, in this case until eating vegetarian dishes becomes an effortless habit.

Enacting and Reflecting

After we planned all aspects of our action and analysed our motivation which allowed us to plan for throwbacks, the only thing left is to take those planned actions towards our goal. Thanks to the careful planning, we made it easy to track our progress and stop for self-reflection now and then. After the first two weeks of eating vegetarian dishes three times a week it worth to take the time to look back on how our plan is working and adjust it. Maybe we find it more difficult than we thought to avoid meat, so we need to make a research on how to replace meat in different recipes. Or we feel like we are not getting full with the vegetarian dishes, therefore, need to raise the portion. On the other hand, it is even more important to celebrate our achievements and progress and give ourselves a well-deserved treat.

The whole planning process together

As a summary here is the example of the planning process to make the whole picture more seethrough:

1. Envisioning the goal of eating more vegetables and the benefits and good feelings associated with it
2. Making a specific plan on how to reach this goal
   • Determine the quantity: eat 3 vegetarian dishes a week
   • Determine the timing: on Monday, Wednesday and Friday
   • Making it more achievable: Planning when and where to buy the ingredients for the dishes and when to find time to cook or find vegetarian diners where we can eat
3. Examine our motivation and plan for throwbacks:
   • Keep the reason in mind (having a healthier body/environmental benefit)
   • Examine our ability: What can be a difficulty for me on the way? It can be the monotony of the vegetarian dishes so we need to plan for introducing more variety
   • Energy to fight throwbacks: Keeping myself motivated and organised until the point when eating vegetarian dishes becomes a habit and costs no extra energy anymore

This is the whole guide for planning to reach your desired diet goal. If a goal is more complex like becoming vegetarian or cutting out sugar it is also important to break it down into subgoals and deal with one chunk at a time, setting SMART goals for each of them. This way a complex goal can still stay more manageable. Good luck with your goal planning and never forget about the original reason that made you work towards your goal.

References:

1. Parker, S. K., Bindl, U. K., & Strauss, K. (2010). Making things happen: A model of proactive motivation. Journal of management, 36(4), 827-856.
2. Bovend’Eerdt, T. J., Botell, R. E., & Wade, D. T. (2009). Writing SMART rehabilitation goals and achieving goal attainment scaling: a practical guide. Clinical rehabilitation, 23(4), 352-361.
3. Pimentel, S. (2008). Goal setting and outcome measurement in a wheelchair service: A client-centred approach. International Journal of Therapy and Rehabilitation, 15(11), 491-499.