For a number of years now, I have been working with various people on the best way to find a great fitness plan that works for them. In just the last three years, I have narrowed down my approach to something I call transitional wellness, “The proper order of three.”

To establish a positive outcome around health and wellness, you must be willing to take the correct approach within three self-disciplines. The first is controlling your emotions and mastering your thoughts. The second is practicing good nutrition and the third, of course, is exercise.

These three well-defined disciplines require anyone jumping into their health and fitness to conduct a self-evaluation of all three. Building a transitional wellness strategy is not easy and does need a little homework before embarking on the journey.

Self-improvement is one of those things in life that we often under estimate how difficult it can be. You must ensure you have accurately assessed your current mental, nutritional and physical make-up so you can lock in great results. A simple assessment that you are ready and understand your strengths and weaknesses can make all the difference in successfully achieving wellness through a transitional process.

Let’s start with the most difficult first step, mastery of our thoughts and emotions. Each New Year more than 40 percent of people living in the U.S. make an emotional or at least serious resolution to improve themselves in the coming year. Often these resolutions are driven by self-image issues and tend to involve health related concerns. These concerns often fall into two categories, body image and weight loss. Statically, these health and fitness resolutions have a 53 percent failure rate within the first 60 days. Statically, 80 percent of those who start a program in January will drop the fitness commitment by the end of the year. That is roughly 100 million people that commit to improve their health and fitness then simply fail to follow through.

The primary reason these well meaning folks fail at the start of every year is they are not mentally prepared, lack discipline and under estimate the effort required to be successful. When we talk about the proper order to building lasting health and wellness, it must start with mindfulness, nurturing a calm mind and your mental commitment to the task.

Mastering your thoughts requires the ability to stay in the moment and be positive, very much something that is key throughout our life. Our world has so many distractions, such as television, fast foods, sweets, drinking and so forth. These “oh so good” bad habits have a way of taking away a disciplined mind which is needed to shift your health and wellness into lifelong permanence.

The next step is a bit easier than the first and involves a practice of good nutrition. I definitely hammer on the why and how good nutrition makes up a disproportionate amount of your overall wellness. To drive the point home, consider that 70 percent of all U.S. health costs are associated with nutrition related chronic disease. Good nutrition is fairly straightforward, but people like to make this aspect complicated. So keep it simple and consistent.

When choosing foods, stick to a few of these basic rules:

• Daily consumption of whole fresh fruits and veggies.

• Get enough protein in your daily diet.

• Drink the proper amount of water every day.

• Include plenty of fiber in your diet every day without exception.

• Eat cultured foods daily, they are key to good digestive health.

• 30 plus percent of your daily food intake needs to be in raw form.

• Limit inflammatory foods such as grains and highly processed foods.

• Stick to a low daily sugar intake and keep your sugars natural if you can.

• Manage your calories and do not overeat!

The third and final step for launching a successful and lifelong wellness regimen is exercise. Referencing back to those failed New Year’s resolutions, we find that almost everyone starts off with exercise as their first step. In my opinion, without practicing the first two steps, you’re almost assured of falling into the 80 percent bracket of failed health and fitness attempts.

Now once you have mastered your thoughts and nutrition, exercise actually becomes the easiest of the three to build on. Exercise is a very broad term and there is no “one size fits all” but the options are vast having something for everyone.

Here are few ideas that you can build on:

• Set a walking goal everyday is an option we can all do. Shoot for 10,000 steps a day.

• Lift weights, even light weights can make a difference, this is very important for bone health, your metabolism and much more.

• Group fitness can be helpful. Walk with friends, take a yoga class, dance class, be part of a group to stay motivated.

• Hire a personal trainer to get things going, learn how to stay on top of your fitness.

• Hike, get outside, be active whenever you can.

The real point to physical fitness is we humans are built to move and be active. Studies have found that walking which increases your heart rate for just 4 hours a week can add 3.4 years of life expectancy. More importantly, it adds quality of life and mobility as you age.

There is no guarantee a transitional wellness strategy that follows these three disciplines of mind, nutrition and fitness will work for everyone. I do think it is fair to say that approaching health and fitness in the same way year after year without lasting results is a waste of time. So no matter whether Mark Twain, Ben Franklin or Einstein said it, the definition of insanity does seem to be well defined as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”

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Judd Jones is a director for The Hagadone Corporation in Coeur d’Alene.