Over the last six weeks I’ve got back into exercising regularly and eating well – and the result is that I’ve lost 6kgs. I’ve achieved that by changing my habits around eating and exercise.
However, what’s really interesting is that the way I’ve managed to change those habits has nothing directly to do with either of them.
Habits are one of the areas I do a lot of work on with my clients and there’s a great deal of evidence that suggests that upwards of 80% of the decisions we make each day are based on habits.
Essentially, habits are heuristics that save us time and energy – imagine the length of the queue at your favourite coffee shop if everybody had to reread the menu and weigh up the pros and cons of each choice every time before ordering!
The problem though is that because they are automatic, we carry them out literally without thinking, and we get the results we’ve always got. If you want a different result, then you have to change the habit, and one way to support doing that is to build an interruption into the automatic process which introduces an opportunity to make a conscious choice.
And that’s exactly what I’ve done.
I have reintroduced a habit that I used successfully before to help me loose over 15kgs a couple of years ago. In the intervening period I stopped doing it and slipped back into poor eating and exercise habits, and my weight started to drift up again.
So what is this amazing habit?
It is very, very simple. I log everything I eat and drink, and the exercise I take, keeping track of the calories I’m consuming and using, making sure I use more than I eat.
I use a free app called MyFitnessPal which makes the whole process very easy. It has a huge database of foods and you can even enter an item by scanning its barcode.
I’m not too fussy about making sure I’m entering exactly the right item or quantity becuase the thing that is really making the difference is that it is interrupting my old habit so that I am able to make real conscious choices. By putting my exercise in, it also gives me an extra opportunity to feel good about doing it. At the end of the day, when I complete the diary, it tells me how much I would weigh in 5 weeks if I ate like that every day – another encouragement to eat well and notice the impact of ‘bad’ days.
I’ve also been using the same principle on a number of other habits, and that will be the subject of another piece, where I’ll explain how you can adapt this approach to any habits you want to change.