Put this on your refrigerator!!!  All great changes require many small steps. We here at www.SavingThePlaces.com have created a simple, daily calendar of actions that you can take to help improve your health, the health of your neighborhood, and the health of the planet. These goals are achievable if we are deliberate in our commitment for a more sustainable and healthy world. Please pass this Behavior Change Model on by Sharing with your friends. Our success will be dependent on the individual commitments of a growing number of people sending a powerful signal to both the marketplace and to our representatives in our governments.

The Model is based on a finite number of actions to be taken each day of the week.

Sunshine Sundays – Get the whole family outside for walks, sports, or just working in the backyard. Give them the gift of nature to enhance their health, mental well-being, and to improve their creativity and their sense of place.

Meatless Mondays – Make at least one day a week meatless to help reduce the massive amounts of water, grain, petroleum, antibiotics, methane, and wastes used or generated by the meat industry. This will also help you become healthier and trimmer, and will save you money.

Turn-It-off Tuesdays – Take a good look at your life and see what can be turned off, unplugged, or turned down. Just because electricity seems to be cheap does not mean that it is or worth wasting. Our air quality, water quality, and health would improve dramatically if we used less electricity.

Water Fountain Wednesdays – Abandon your sugar-sweetened beverages and your plastic bottles of water. Reduce the waste, the cost, and the health impacts by drinking public water.

Trash-free Thursdays – Look at all the trash you generate and consider how to reduce it to zero. Start by not generating any more trash this week.

Fossil Fuel-less Fridays – Work from home or take mass transit. Cut your commuting time to nil and your commuting costs by 20%. See how much more effective and stress-free you can be when you don’t commute.

Sugar-free Saturdays – there is no better time for your family to learn to cut back on sugar than when they are together on weekends. Meal time, snack time, shopping, and planning of meals can all be done with far less sugar. You will be healthier, you will lower your risks of many major diseases, and you will feel better.

Your comments are welcome. Feel free to adjust the list to make it fully relevant to your life. Then post this calendar on your refrigerator. Stick to it. Thanks.

Take-a-way: We often feel powerless in facing the challenges of today. These are a few steps that you can take that will have an impact on your health, the health of our neighborhoods, and the health of the planet.