? You can design a climate where realistic, positive change can occur, instead of setting yourself (and your program participants) up for failure and disappointment.



? Especially for addictive or otherwise compelling behaviors, you can turn relapses and setbacks into learning opportunities ? which will translate into more lasting progress down the road.

? You can help program participants stay motivated and watch them make new, healthy habits a permanent part of their daily lives.

However, incorporating Stages of Change into a health education or other type of program requires some investments of time and other resources. Challenges include:

? figuring out instruments and other tools that accurately assess participants' stages of change

? adapting initiatives to incorporate the Stages of Change model in appropriate and beneficial ways, and

? evaluating and assessing these new efforts

Gold's Gym Wellness Coach

In today's fast paced world our busy lives leave little time, energy, or motivation for people to emphasis on their own needs.

Those that do seek to improve their Health traditionally turn to friends, family, professionals and published materials for support and information. All too often those support structures fail to make a lasting difference. This happens for a number of reasons. Friends and family may not be capable of helping. Working with professionals is time consuming and expensive and very few of us are effective at taking published, generic information and applying it to our own lives.

Gold's Gym Winston-Salem has developed a new online program that expands the range of support available to those wishing to make healthy lifestyle changes. The program, Gold's Gym Wellness Coach, focuses on the everyday challenges of making positive lifestyle changes and has the advantages of being more customized and efficient than generic, published information and less intense and expensive than professional face-to-face counseling.