Have you ever tried changing up your exercise & eating routines to achieve a fitness goal, and struggled to maintain your initial progress? Does this lead to a point where you start to beat yourself up, thinking ‘if only I had more willpower’?
If this is you, you’re not alone. When you attempt to maintain a drastic change in eating and exercise habits, you’re often relying on willpower. When your level of willpower starts to wane, this leads to you reverting to previous behaviours that don’t support your goals.
a regime built on the bedrock of willpower is built on a weak foundation
Willpower is the ability to delay or avoid immediate gratification in pursuit of achieving a change. But willpower isn’t a reliable resource because it exhausts sooner or later. Therefore, a fitness and eating regime built on the bedrock of willpower is built on a weak foundation.
The key to making the permanent changes to achieve and most importantly to maintain your fitness goals is to change your habits.
Habits are a secret weapon in achieving results. They help you develop the magical ability to do the positive things you need to do without really thinking about it. Not only that, but habits can also help you sustain those wonderful results for the long term.
How do habits help to achieve long-term change?
When you go on an aggressive diet to lose weight, it will usually involve either reducing or eliminating a food group or drastically reducing calorie intake in a short space of time.
While this may lead to a quick result, in the long run the change may not be sustainable or healthy. So, eventually you’ll revert to previous behaviour, leading to a loss in the results you achieved.
A more sustainable approach is to develop healthy habits incrementally through small, repeated actions. These small, repeated actions help you develop new behaviours that become entrenched because they’re small and therefore easy to repeat. This will lead you in the direction you wish to go for the long term.
Small positive behaviours lead to mini wins that are easy to repeat. This repetition with the reward of the mini win incentivises repeating the same behaviour to achieve even more mini wins. This in turn creates momentum.
By repeating these positive behaviours and continuing to achieve mini wins, the activity becomes habitual.
How do we build good habits?
According to James Clear in his seminal book Atomic Habits, the first step to developing good habits is to choose an activity that takes 2 minutes or less.
By focusing on a habit that takes such a short time, the initial investment is easier to rationalise, thereby easier to repeat. By focusing on a short, easy activity that can be repeated consistently, you can develop momentum through a series of small wins.
The best result is to create a positive action that can be repeated without thinking about it. Once you master the ‘2-minute or less’ action, you can start to expand the length and complexity of that action to suit your goals even more.
For example, if you often buy a sandwich and a bag of crisps for your lunch, add a piece of fruit to what you purchase. This will make your lunch more satisfying, and a little bit healthier.
A progression for this could be to replace the crisps with two pieces of fruit.
You don’t need to make extreme changes all at once. You just need to get a little bit better, one step at a time.
How long does it take to BUILD a good habit?
It depends on the activity you choose and how consistently you complete it.
An important element of habit development is to track your progress visually, so you see daily progress. This is a very effective tool to keep you on track and leads to further entrenching the desired behaviour.
The comedian Jerry Seinfeld was once asked how he maintained his habit of consistently writing jokes. He has a large calendar in his kitchen, and each day he writes jokes he marks a big red ‘X’ on that day. The key is to not break the chain, thereby creating a string of consistent, positive activity.
By choosing an activity that can be easily repeated, you’re more likely to repeat that activity consistently. Consistent activity leads to habit development, but it also leads to mastery of the activity through consistent practice.
When you master the activities that leads to your goals, you achieve your goals.
ABOUT JAMES STARING
James Staring is a personal trainer based in Clapham, London. His methods have been featured in publications such as Your Fitness, Hello, Healthy, Daily Mail, Closer, and many more. After giving up smoking and entering the fitness industry in 2009, James has focused on his passion to help others transform their health and fitness. However, James is convinced most people struggle so much more than they need to in an effort to improve their fitness. Through his company, Fit to Last, James has helped hundreds of men and women make small adjustments in their daily habits to transform their fitness and to love how they look and feel.