The Power of Habit

Do you struggle to maintain your weight loss over the long run? Do you find yourself losing and gaining the same 5-10kg time and time again? You’re not alone. In this article we will share with you the most important aspect for creating long term sustainable changes to your health, fitness, and body.

Losing weight or getting down to a low body fat percentage are outcome goals. They are outside our control because we cannot command our fat cells to reduce in number and size by a certain date. You should have an outcome goal and even more importantly be crystal clear on why you want to achieve it.

Once you’ve decided on that outcome goal you need to shift your focus and energy onto the daily behaviours and actions that will move you closer towards that outcome. These are process goals. They differ from outcome goals in the sense that you have full control over them. Here are some examples of process goals:

1- I commit to exercising at home for 30 minutes every day after work

2- I am cooking dinner at home every day instead of ordering fast food

As you can see these goals are specific, actionable, and simple to perform. They also move you in that direction of your vision by telling you exactly what needs to be done.

Our coaches help clients set clear and meaningful outcome goals while deciding on the process goals that they feel confident in doing on a daily basis. Once they start executing on those daily actions they start to make progress and build momentum. After a couple of weeks and months they will notice big improvements in the way they look, feel, and perform.

They feel motivated by the results that they continue applying the daily practices for a consistent period of time, each day making them stronger, more resilient, and confident in their abilities.

Habits put us on auto pilot. They make it easier to perform daily tasks. Your brain doesn’t always solve new problems all the time. It solves it once and commits that solution to memory saving it for future scenarios.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Can you imagine how stressful life would be if we had to sit down and think through every decision we were about to make? Simple things that have been ingrained in our life like brushing our teeth, driving, and using utensils to eat our food wouldn’t be so simple anymore.

While habits make decision making easier and less time consuming, they also serve another purpose: To help us avoid pain, discomfort, or threats and keep us safe and secure.

We're going to share a story from one of our clients that you may be able to relate to. It's something we notice happen with a lot of clients and it will give you an idea on how easy it is to develop habits.

About a year ago one our clients started a new job and as with anything new, change is not easy. He felt the high pressure to perform and there was a lot of information to take on. On top of that he was working early mornings, and not getting enough sleep. While he was making progress in his work and getting better with every day, over time this took it’s toll on me.

He needed to relax and de stress. So he turned to food as comfort.

After a long day at work he would head straight to the grocery store buy a few snacks, order take out food from his favourite restaurant, turn on netflix, and enjoy a relaxing evening.

This client was using food and overeating to avoid pain and discomfort. To feel safe and secure. This became a habit for months which led to him gaining weight, feeling low on energy, and unhappy with his body.

Eventually he decided to ask for help to break this habit. That's when he joined our coaching program and took the necessary steps to solve the underlying problem with the help of an understanding coach. He's now learnt from his experiences, lost all the weight he gained and is a lot stronger because of it.

Whether you experience something similar or not, it's important to understand how habits are formed because that will give you the knowledge and ability to change them. Here are the 5 steps of habit formation:

1. Start with a deceptive brain message.
2. Feel uncomfortable mentally, emotionally, and/or physically. For this client that was stress and overwhelm from work.
3. Do something to make the discomfort go away — usually a habitual response. (This ain’t your brain’s first discomfort rodeo, after all.) In his case that would be late night snacking and overeating
4. Relieve the distress temporarily. Food comes in. Stress and worry goes down. For the time being.
5. That creates or reinforces the original deceptive brain message: Doing the unhealthy habit will make the discomfort go away.

Now that you have an understanding on how habits, specifically bad ones, are formed ask yourself these questions and be non judgemental in your responses. The goals is to simply notice your own tendencies and build more self awareness.

1- What habits and routines do I practice on a daily basis when it comes to my eating and food choices?

2- What do I automatically do without much thought?

3- Why might that be the case? What problem am I trying to solve? What distress am I trying to reduce?

4- What good habits can I add?

Habits are powerful. They make decisions easy and automatic saving us valuable time and energy. They can be good and bad for us depending on the type of habits we develop. If your goal is to both lose weight and make health and fitness a part of your life where you don’t have to worry about gaining the weight you lost you will need to look closely at the things you’re doing on a daily basis that could be holding you back, understand their purpose, and add more good habits over time.

This is what leads to long term sustainable change and it's why we help all our clients through our online nutrition and lifestyle coaching program develop healthy habits over time that will move them in the direction of their goals.

If you found this article helpful let us know in the comments below and make sure to share it with a friend, family member, or anyone else you know who needs to read it!