Sleep! Try to catch 7 to 9 hours each night. This, I know from personal experience, can seem like an unrealistic goal, but the amount of research that supports the connection between shut-eye and health makes me shoot for this star every day. For starters, catching enough zzz’s can help you lose weight. In a study of more than 68,000 women, those who dozed seven hours a night weighed 5.5 pounds less than women who slept five hours or less. Ample sleep encourages your body to make more of the fullness hormone leptin and less of the hunger hormone ghrelin, so you’re not as hungry. Snoozing can also curb anxiety and depression, both of which can lead to emotional eating. As if that’s not enough reason, too little rest can cloud moral judgment, too. Try going to bed just 30 minutes earlier each night to see how much you’ll benefit.
Exercise! Yes, breaking a sweat can help you lose weight, but it can also curb cravings, help you live longer, reduce stress, undo some of the damage of eating fatty foods—and those are just a few of the benefits. Aim for 30 minutes a day—even a walk counts toward your tally—and give yourself a star each time you fulfill that goal with any one of your favorite workouts.
Eat right! No, you don’t have to count calories. You can eat healthy and have delicious, filling and satisfying meals (snacks, too!). If you’re doing the 2009 SELF Challenge, give yourself a star for every day that you eat according to the Challenge meal plan and log your meals in your online food diary. If you’re not doing the Challenge, you can still snag a star when you’ve eaten in a way that makes your body feel good—and you feel proud. For me, that’s when I opt for yogurt with berries rather than a muffin at breakfast, have a salad with tofu for lunch and choose salmon over steak at dinner, then skip the ice cream pig-out late at night. Yes, it’s that simple! I’m not perfect, and there are definitely days when I have a second glass of wine or a too-generous square of my favorite dark chocolate bar, but I find that once I start building that five-star day, I get invested in it and want to keep it up.
Stretch! Limbering up is a way to thank your muscles for all the hard work they do for you each day. It can also help you increase your overall range of motion, making exercise seem less difficult. And when workouts are less daunting, you’ll not only enjoy them more, but you also will probably do them more often, too! To me, yoga and pilates count, as does just stretching at the kitchen counter as I watch the headlines in the morning. No need to set aside a huge block of time! However you choose to go Gumby, give yourself a star for treating your body to a break.
Talk yourself up! This might be the most important part of the five-star plan: Giving yourself a well-deserved pat on the back for simply being strong, smart and healthy. Even on days when you only notch one or two other stars, take a moment to give yourself credit for being a truly amazing human being. Talking yourself up carries over to other areas of your life: Not only will you feel more confident, but research shows you will also get sick about 30 percent less frequently, stave off emotional eating and reduce your cancer risk. There are plenty of other reasons to celebrate your body. Pretty impressive for a few pats on the back!
Create your own five-star days: When you join the Challenge, you can use our free online logs to track the stars you earn each day. Counting stars is motivating, and rewarding yourself for smart, healthy behavior is more inspiring than the negative mind-sets required by most "diets." I had to create a system in my own head that was simple, easy to track and optimistic. The best part is that you get to start fresh every day, so even if you only manage one or two stars one day, you can stay with it by going to sleep early and telling yourself, like Scarlett O’Hara, tomorrow is another day!
By Lucy Danziger, SELF Editor-in-Chief
