I have decided to drink three litres of water per day as my social marketing activity. By undertaking this behaviour change process, I will improve my own personal health and body functions. I want to experience and document the benefits first-hand, and demonstrate this to the others. I plan to experiment with different motivational techniques and discover which work best for me. Obviously I will face different obstacles and issues every day that will challenge me in drinking three whole litres a day, but I hope to document these and find strategies to overcome them.
A reflection on the first two weeks…
Two weeks after beginning the challenge, I realised that it will be more difficult than I originally anticipated. To begin with, I was travelling back from the US and was stuck on a plane for 12 hours. It was too difficult having to constantly get up and use the bathroom; needless to say, I did not achieve my daily goal. Once back at home I quickly realised that drinking this amount of water each day was not a habit, and would require constant effort [see Aug. 13 tweet].
By the end of the first week I begun avidly searching the internet for motivational pictures and people to follow who would remind me to drink more water. I actually found that some of my overseas friends happened to be sharing images of healthy eating motivations [see Aug. 16 tweet] and I felt I wasn’t alone in wanting to change my drinking behaviours. I also found that carrying my water bottle everywhere meant that it was easily accessible, and it became a reminder.
I was originally struggling to remember how much water I had actually drank, so I decided to download a water-intake tracking app [see Aug. 17 tweet]. This seemed to help, as it provided me with a visual representation and percentage of how I was progressing each day. On the first day of using the app I did make progress and achieved my goal of drinking a whole three litres. However, as the second week of the challenge continued I slowly drank less and less water each day, even failing to meet my goal by 40% on the 20th of August. I seemed to be so preoccupied with university assignments and working that my daily goal was neglected. In this second week I noticed that when I was too distracted to concentrate on drinking enough water in the morning, it became too difficult to make up for this in the evening.
Looking back at my struggle over the past two weeks I’ve become even more determined to accomplish this goal every day. I believe that having practiced drinking more water each day I can make this become a daily habit. I believe that once I begin the pattern of consecutively achieving this daily goal, it will be easy to continue the pattern.
reneeschwarze 