Preparing for the future

Welcome back to week 11 of our 12 Week Weight Management Programme. Well done for getting this far. You've one week to go.

This week we'll start reflecting on how far you've come in the last 10 weeks. First let’s do our usual check-in.

Weekly check-in

How did you get on last week? Are you eating mindfully on a regular basis?

I can do, I will do, I'm doing

We'll talk next week about how to ensure on going support at the end of the programme. This week is a good time for you to start looking at what changes have been important to you and for your wellbeing. You need to consider how to keep these going after the end of the programme.

Take the next 10 to 15 minutes and consider the following questions. Write down your answers, so you can reflect on them:

• What changes have you achieved over the last 10 weeks?
• What has improved for you? This could be what you eat, how you feel, your level of exercise or your weight.
• Which of these improvements do you need to keep going once the programme finishes next week? We call this maintenance.

Keeping changes going

One important aspect of weight management is to keep going with the healthier changes you've made to your lifestyle. This isn't always easy to do and there'll be many occasions when you'll find it challenging or even impossible. We call these tricky situations.

There are many tricky situations in life, including:

• holidays
• nights out
• family get togethers such as Sunday lunch or Grannie’s birthday
• advertising campaigns around Christmas and New Year
• a celebration
• coping with the weather - it always seems to be raining

Planning ahead

In week 7 we talked about planning ahead. This is one of the things you can do for these tricky situations. Make a plan around what you might choose to eat or drink – look for lower calorie options on menus.

People have told us they have planned for this by being more careful with what they eat the day before and/or the day after. Some people even make plans to be more active for a few days. It's your plan and it's important that you feel able to carry it out.

We know that this type of planning is important to help you keep up your behaviour changes and at the same time get through these tricky situations.

Revisiting the programme

Every now and again you may notice some of your old habits coming back into your daily routine. If this is more than just the occasional tricky situation then consider doing some of the exercises from this programme. Think about why you want to keep your weight under control and how important this is to you.

If you've stopped using lifestyle recordings or setting goals then go back and use these again to help you review and adjust your behaviours. Remember you can come back to this programme at any time.

Type 2 diabetes

At the beginning of this programme we recommended that you find out your risk of Type 2 diabetes by using the Diabetes UK Know your Risk Score tool. If you haven’t done this yet this is a very good time to do this now.

Recording your lifestyle

If you've been recording your lifestyle using our downloadable diary, a journal, an app or taking photos over all or most of the last 10 weeks - good for you.

We hope you've seen the benefits in recording:

• what you eat and drink
• your physical activity time
• your sleep pattern
• how you feel
• hunger scale
• inactive time

Keep going with your lifestyle recording after the programme finishes.

If you haven’t managed to record your lifestyle yet don’t worry there's still time to give it a go. Go back to week 1 and read through the what, why and how.

Setting your goals

Setting goals each week has been an important part of the programme and one we want to strongly suggest you continue with after the end of the programme.

When setting your weekly goals you should:

• decide which day next week you will be coming back to this programme, this will be the day you can review your goals
• consider the areas for change we have discussed this week
• look at your lifestyle diary/journal/app/photos and choose areas where you feel you could make a small change over the next week
• ask yourself what you can do more of, what you can do less of and what would help you me make these changes
• add 1 or 2 new goals - we recommend 3 to 4 weekly changes goals are the most you should ever set yourself

If you don’t meet your goals every day, that’s ok. It’s important to keep returning to what you've written down. We’ll review them next week.

Your can use our goal-setting tool to record your goals for the week, or print out our blank weekly journal (PDF, 42KB) to fill in yourself.