By Karen Kwan
Get healthy. We all start the year with this in mind. Many of us make lofty goals to drop some weight and plan to go all out with regular tough workouts and aim to eat only the freshest, most nutritious meals–kale salads, all day, every day! The problem is that often these big tactics are more than any of us can accomplish on a long-term basis. Which is why, for 2024, Kate Hudson recommends tackling your health goals with small steps.
The starlet and her trainer Brian Nguyen have partnered with nutrition-tracking app MyFitnessPal to approach this year’s resolutions differently: by making little daily changes that will add up to healthy new habits over time.
The new Small Steps Challenge is free–which is great for your let’s-save-money financial goals for the new year–and is focused on simple steps that are sustainable for a lifetime. Hudson herself is a longtime MyFitnessPal user and it’s helped her with everything from better nutrition to weight loss (and let’s face it–the glowing mom has long been a fitness inspiration with her Fabletics line of apparel).
The good news is that you don’t have to overhaul your life to complete Hudson’s challenge. If you’ve ever made a resolution to work out every morning at 5 a.m. when you’ve never been a morning person, you know how long that lasted. Instead of huge, daunting shifts in your day-to-day routine, here, you make small changes, while tracking your nutrition and activity on MyFitnessPal, so that you’re much more likely to set yourself up for success in the long run. As you track everything in the app, you’ll come to learn what foods best fuel you and have you feeling energized. Keep in mind, too, that it’s not all about losing weight. The app, and the challenge, can be a great tool no matter where you are in your health and fitness journey to guide you regardless of whether you are working with a personal trainer, nutritionist or coach or not.
What will challenging yourself with Hudson and Nguyen as your virtual cheerleaders be like? The Small Steps Challenge covers everything from developing the simple habit of logging in your meals and improving how you plan your meals to getting a handle on your sugar consumption and making sure you’re consuming a healthy amount of lean protein.
Can these baby steps lead to healthy habits for a lifetime? Even adopting one of the steps on an ongoing basis would be beneficial–and we’re betting her small steps will pan out better than her advice in How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days.
