How to use habits to make weight loss easy
As an online weight loss coach I am always being asked the question, “how do I lose weight when I’ve lost the motivation?” The answer to this question is – to use habits. The difference between a person who lives a healthy lifestyle and someone who doesn’t is that the first person has created more healthy habits than the second.
Habits are wonderful things that enable us to take a huge amount of information and distil it into a simple behaviour that we perform naturally. Habits require us to do the opposite of think. In fact we perform most habits without even realising we are doing them. Kissing a child goodnight, putting on slippers when we walk in the house, turning on the radio when we are making breakfast.
“As I accumulated dozens of new habits—mostly tiny ones—they combined to create a transformation. Sustaining all this did not feel hard. Pursuing change in this way felt natural and oddly fun.”
― B.J. Fogg, Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything
To lose weight you will need to incorporate a number of small habits that set you on the path to the healthy lifestyle and weight loss you desire. This could be as simple as going to bed 30 minutes earlier, increasing your daily step count or eating five portions of fruit or vegetables each day.
To start this process you have to:
First identify the habit you want to create, then start small. Build the habit up gradually. Don’t overwhelm yourself by trying to create too many new habits at the same time or by making the new habit too much of a leap for you. If you are someone who never cooks then don’t expect to create a habit of cooking five days a week overnight. Start with one night a week. When that becomes achievable then add another night, build up to five days a week. Similarly with exercise, it won’t be sustainable to create a habit of exercising at the gym for an hour, four times a week if you currently do no exercise at all. Start small. Go once a week or incorporate some weight lifting at home so that you can get into the habit of exercising before you start to increase the habit.
Second, protect the habit while it is forming. Habits are fragile at this stage of creation and missing your weekly gym session one week will lead to you thinking it is ok to skip it the following week. This behaviour prevents the habit from forming. Referred to as “loop holes” Gretchen Rubin author of Better than Before says they are “an argument for why we should be excused from following a good habit.” They take all different shapes and sizes from “I’ve been so good with my exercise recently, skipping one session won’t make a difference” to “I haven’t eaten lunch so it will be fine if I have cake this afternoon.” Watch out for these loopholes and try to remain consistent with your habit.
Third, repeat the behaviour until it becomes something habitual, something you do without thinking. This will be when you can say, “you always have a healthy breakfast, you always work out on a Monday, you always walk down to the shops.” Better still the habit becomes part of your identity. You can go further by saying “I am not someone who eats cake, I am someone who exercises, I choose to walk to places if I can, I drink a lot of water during the day.”
The additional benefit of creating a healthy habit is the concept of “cluster habits” where one habit creates another and another. Once the first healthy habit is established, each habit in the cluster is much easier to create. For example, regularly working out on a Monday leads to the habit of drinking more water, choosing a healthy breakfast to fuel the workout, going to bed earlier because you are physically tired and want to rest etc.
People who have tried to lose weight and not managed it in the past always blame their lack of motivation or will power or think there is something wrong with them. Many weight loss clients will tell me during their coaching sessions that they are a failure. In reality they just haven’t been shown how to build up the healthy habits which are needed to create sustainable weight loss.
Sometimes the habits we have created work against our goal of pursuing a healthy lifestyle and it is necessary to unpick those habits and stop performing them. As this is such an important and useful topic I think I should use it for my next blog post!
