Customer Reviews

Living SMART: Five Essential Skills to Change Your Health Habits Forever

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

When I first started reading this book, I must confess that I was somewhat skeptical. Being middle-aged and overweight, I've read so many books on losing weight and eating right, etc. This book, however, is delightfully different. First, it's simple. The SMART skills are easy to remember, and they apply to any healthy habit the reader might want to begin. Second, the charts and questionnaires are informative and useful. Having them available on the website is an added bonus. Third, this book reads quickly and doesn't overwhelm the reader with a bunch of scientific research that I could frankly care less about. Just tell me what I need to do, and that's what this book does.
Halfway through the book, I found a small notebook and recorded three positive things that happened today. I then proceeded to clean off my treadmill and get on it for the first time in months. After that, I settled back with an apple to read the rest of the book. Those are positive changes already! With the motivators in the book and the advice on what to do when drifting from the goal, I just may be able to keep up these healthy habits.

Overall, this book is as interesting and as motivating as a book can be about health behavior modification. In graduate school I took a required course in health behavior and health education, which I found to be dreadfully boring and for the most part, unhelpful. In the class I learned the traditional SMART acronym (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely) for setting goals. Hands down, I believe this SMART system (Set a goal, Monitor your progress, Arrange your world for success, Recruit a support team, and Treat yourself) will be more effective at motivating individuals to make changes in their health than traditional SMART goals. I only wish I had used this book in the course I took in graduate school - it would have made the class so much more interesting and useful in my everyday life!

I received this book in the fall and I started reading it right away. Since it is now late winter and I'm just reviewing it, obviously something went wrong along the way. One of the first things the book talks about is taking a look at whether you actually want to change your behavior. I found out that I didn't. This surprised me and actually made me realize why it was always so difficult to reach my goals even though I had the knowledge and knew what steps to take to change. This may sound like a really simple concept, but that is exactly what this book is full of. Simple concepts that most people think they know but don't fully put into practice.
The book includes a very simple and straightforward 5 step plan that you can use to change any health habit or actually any habit at all for that matter. It includes charts that you can download from the website for charting your progress. It also discusses drifting, which happens to everyone when you are trying to change a habit and is usually the cause of failure. There are many good ideas for how to get back on track. There is also a chapter directly addressing four major health areas people would like to change and specific ideas for them. The book ends with some helpful resources.
I've read a lot of self help books on behavioral change and this is one of the most simple books I've read. But don't mistake that for unhelpful fluff. I think this may actually be the book that gets me to my goals.

Written by Joshua C. Klapow, Ph.D. (Associate Professor, Department of Health Care Organization and Policy, University of Alabama at Birmingham) and Sheri D. Pruitt, Ph.D. (Director of Behavioral Science Integration for The Permanente Medical Group), Living Smart: Five Essential Skills to Change Your Health Habits Forever is a how-to guide to changing one's unhealthy behavior. The five keystones of the SMART behavioral program are: Set a goal, Monitor your progress, Arrange your world for success, Recruit a support team, and Treat yourself. Step-by-step instructions for building "game plans" to structure one's life with healthier diet, exercise, and sleep patterns (and also remember to take any needed medications punctually) help set the reader on a path to lifelong wellness. Living Smart is a consumable book, offering blank lines for the reader to write out answers to questions and blank charts to get started keeping a schedule; the end result is a life plan that is highly customized to suit one's individual needs. Highly recommended.

Do you want to find the solution for making lifelong changes to improve your health? Written by two behavior psychologists, this book is easy-to-read and shows how you can successfully make permanent change. The first section explains the principles of change: the what, the want and the how. The key to success is making use of the five essential SMART skills which are explained in depth. The middle section gives four specific and detailed examples often pursued by those wanting to live a healthier lifestyle: making a diet change, following an exercise plan, changing to better sleep patterns and taking medication properly. Each example demonstrates the what, the want and the how using SMART skills. The last section of the book gives common examples of people running into problems in their efforts to change, and the solutions on how to combat these behavioral `drifts'. Writing exercises and tips throughout the book reinforce your ability to keep on track. The appendix includes charts to monitor your change (an important key to success) as well as a list of other resources including the website associated with this book. I would recommend this book as a very helpful reference for anyone attempting to make a realistic long term change in their health habits.

Like the best things in life, the concepts in this book are extremely simple. Are they simple to enact? Ultimately, yes, though you have to be willing to be honest with yourself and do some thinking about the reasons you claim for failing to stick with any change of behavior.

Especially poignant is the introduction and discussion of behavioral drift, which will affect most people who are trying to change their behavior. How can you resist a force that you do not know about? You can't. But now you know about behavioral drift and are given a tool to combat it, making it less likely that you'll slip back into old habits. And if you do slip? There are tools here to help you recognize the slip is beginning before you're so far back to where yo began that you become completely discouraged and give in to the old behavior.

Is this book the answer for everybody. Of course not, but many people will find it useful.

Another nice facet is the presentation of case studies for weight loss, getting more sleep, taking medications, and starting an exercise regimen. Specific examples are given for these situations and some great suggestions are offered. You can even take these examples and apply the SMART technique to any sort of behavior modification you're interested in. It may take some tweaking for your specific purpose and situation, but that's the beauty of such a simplified system

Living SMART; Five Essential Skills to Change Your Health Habits Forever by Joshua C. Klapow, Ph.D. and Sheri D. Pruitt, Ph.D.


Beginning with the premise that health and wellbeing is a matter of what one does or does not do every day, the authors use the acronym SMART to describe the steps of their plan. The preface notes that changing habits doesn't have to be a "simple matter of common sense and motivation" or "incredibly complicated behavioral interactions."
What sets this book apart from the many others written on the subject is that for each step, (the first being Set a goal), the reader is presented with a detailed set of baby steps to use in implementing the plan. The guidelines are designed to be in place even when the initial motivation fades and user is faced with then temptation to backslide.
Myths regarding changing habits are debunked and guidelines are set for evaluating the plethora of available health information with which we are faced daily. Planning sheets are included to address diet, exercise and other healthful habits.
Neither lofty nor too lengthy, this is a perfect read for anyone overwhelmed with available information as well as those who have ready excuses for not embracing a healthful lifestyle.

If you've tried and tried again to get into an exercise habit or learn to eat better or quit smoking, and always found yourself back-sliding, this is the book for you. I really don't think there's anything new in this book, and it's repetitive to the point where it felt like they were just padding it out to make a page quota, but the information is good, complete and delivered in a hand-holding way as if from a concerned coach who's pulling for your success. If you want to change your habits and you take this book seriously, if you put it to work for you without skipping over steps that don't appeal to you, I don't see how you can fail.

I've been to many a seminar where goal-setting and success-oriented techniques were taught, and I know this material. Still, to have it all spelled out so simply here, I found new motivation and a couple of new tools that I've implemented to get me back on track with some of my goals.

This isn't great reading, but the information is golden. If you're willing to try anything in order to change your habits for the better, start here with the essential information you'll need to keep you on the right track.

I have recommended this book to numerous clients. Klapow & Pruitt have made Cognitive Behavioral Therapy easy for anyone to understand and apply to his or her daily life. The authors intended to write a book on changing health habits. As I read this book I thought, "The title could have been 'Psychology for Living'." Klapow and Pruitt have successfully taken one of the most difficult challenges of life (health related behavior change) and made success attainable for everyone.

I think anyone struggling with change will benefit from this book. The principles are fundamental and apply to all forms of behavior change, not just specific health related problems. If you have decided to make positive changes in your life, I know you will benefit from owning Living SMART.

Written by two clinical psychologists, "Living SMART" promises to give its readers "simple skills to successfully make positive health or lifestyle changes." And, for the most part, it does. Klapow and Pruitt have created a simple, intuitive system (encapsulated in the mnemonic SMART, which I won't explain here as other reviewers have already covered it below) to help readers achieve such difficult modern day goals as losing weight, eating right, and getting enough sleep. Yes, their system is mostly common sense, but the beauty of this book is in stressing, again and again, that just knowing something will not help one accomplish it. Only through systematic repetition, monitoring of one's progress, and the ability to recognize when one's motivation is slipping (and how to get it back), can one effect real, lasting change. I cannot stress how appreciative I am that the authors acknowledge that making any lasting change will take perseverance and work; there is no quick fix.

Unfortunately, there are a few flaws in the book which prevent it from attaining perfection. First, the authors assume that those around the reader will be uniformly supportive of the reader's goals. As anyone who's ever tried to quit smoking in a household where other family members don't want to give up the habit, or get to bed at a decent time when a husband or friend doesn't want to forego the traditional late night drinking or movie sessions, can attest, not everyone will automatically get on board when one tries to make a change for the better. In fact, they may actively try to undermine one's efforts. Yet Klapow and Pruitt offer no suggestions or strategies for dealing with such situations, making this book much less useful to any reader whose family and friends aren't behind them 100 percent.

The other flaw is the frequent word-for-word repetition of paragraphs throughout the text (check out pages 47 and 152-53 for an example). This means readers are getting less book than the page count alone would suggest. While it could be argued that this removes the need to to flip back and forth between chapters, the authors could have made more of an effort to reword the passages instead of cutting-and-pasting them wholesale.

It's unfortunate that these two flaws mar an otherwise excellent book. But with those caveats out of the way, I can say that "Living SMART" can give readers the tools they'll need to help making positive lifestyle changes.