Day + Habits = Life

This is a guest article.

Our daily habits in any area of our life determine our results.

Habitually overeat, and you’ll gain weight. Habitually skip your workout and your weight will plateau or even rise. But on the other hand, habitually make healthy choices about food and the quantities you chose, and your weight will get to and stay at where you want it. Our habits really do determine our lives! But how do you know when a new habit you’ve been working on has truly become a habit?

Experts all agree that if you are working on breaking a bad habit, whether it be nail-biting, smoking and of course overeating, that you need to replace the bad habit with a good one. Nature hates a vacuum, and if you just stop doing the bad habit, without replacing it with something else, the bad habit will soon be back, occupying its old place.

Habits that can replace the overeating habit may include:

- waiting 20 minutes before eating

- drinking a glass of water instead

- going for a walk

- calling a friend

- journalling

- anything at all you find pleasant to do that is non-food related

For the first 21-30 days of quitting a bad habit, you are going to have to continually think about what you are working on not doing and what you will do instead. You will have to remind yourself of your commitment to breaking the habit, and that you have a new habit you are incorporating.

It is normal during this first month or so to even temporarily forget about your new habit and end up doing what you said you weren’t going to do. So use Post-it notes placed in strategic places to remind you to stay on track. These little notes can be invaluable in these first few weeks, use tons of them!

But here’s the kicker. Every time you stick with your plan, and do what you have promised yourself you will do, you actually set it up in your brain for it to be much easier to stay on track the next time you are tempted to stray. You literally reinforce the new thought connections in your mind, making it stronger and more prominent. Conversely, every time you let yourself fall back into old habits, you reinforce the bad habit and make it harder to stay on the right track, and even harder to get back on track.

Remember this every time you are tempted to fall off the healthy-eating bandwagon. Remind yourself that if you just stay on track this time, you are making it easier and easier to stay on track the next time, and the next time and every time after that. Each time strengthens this new thought pathway. (To learn more about how this happens, I suggest a great book called “The Brain That Changes Itself” by Dr Norman Doidge. It’s fascinating!)

And once this thought pathway has been created and strengthened, it will become your automatic response, replacing the old response of turning to food and overeating. You’ll know when this new habit has truly been cemented into your mind when you find yourself just doing the better choice, without having to have any internal dialogue about it first. It just happens. No bribing yourself, no see-sawing about which way to go, no anything really. It just happens. It takes time to get to this stage, and too many people quit before it happens.

The journey to your ideal weight is composed of a series of steps. Each bad habit you break and replace with a healthier one will lead you one step closer to your goal and your ideal weight. Stick with your new habits, and they will become part of, and take credit for creating the new you. I promise!

Written by Stacey Grieve

This article was originally published by Stacey on her website Why Are You Weighting?

Before you can properly shed the pounds, you need to shed the emotional baggage you’ve been carrying around. Lose that baggage, and you’ll lose the weight. Getting rid of the habits, attitudes and histories that keep us heavy isn’t easy, but it can be done with a little help. With Why Are You Weighting, you can get to the roots of your weight and yourself. If you make changes on the inside, the results will show on the outside.

Article photo by pepperstory

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