I came upon this article in Nutrition Toady Volume 31 #4 from August 1996. Nutrition Today isn^Òt quite the magazine you would find me reading, but to tell you the truth this article interested me greatly. The author is a lady who has a nutritional doctorate. This article includes many claims about what it takes physically and mentally to eat right and keep a healthy body weight, but at the same time it proves those claims with many facts.
The big question is if dietary behavior change is difficult, how can health and nutrition professionals effectively intervene. The author uses the Stages of Change Model as proposed by Prochaska and Colleagues for addictive behaviors consists of six dynamic stages. The six stages are: Precontemplation, Contemplation, preparation, action maintenance, and termination. Precontemplation is when an individual is not considering making any changes. Contemplation is the time when an individual is aware there is a problem and is considering taking action to resolve it. Preparation refers to the time when an individual commits to taking action sometime within the next 30 days. Action is the busiest time. There are noticeable efforts to change the targeted behavior. Maintenance is the stage when a person tries to stabilize the behavior change and prevent relapse. Termination is the final stage, this occurs when there is zero temptation to revert back to the old behavior. Now the author uses these six stages to relate it to dietary habits and how people can use this process in their lives and make them become aware how to fix their dietary problems and even problems beyond that.
In this article the author says, and I quote ^ÓThis model may be useful for nutrition and health professionals in both clinical and community settings.
It can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of an educational intervention.
As a result of reading this article I became more aware of myself and what to look for when getting into bad habits. I would recommend this article to anybody
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