“Habits are cobwebs at first; cables at last.”
- Chinese proverb
Consider for a moment how much of your life is controlled by habits: habits of thought; habits of action; and habits of behavior.
Some habits, like which shoe you tie up first, have very little effect on your life. Others have a profound impact. Take for example, the habit of eating high-fat, highly-processed, pre-packaged convenience food. While it certainly saves time, it puts your health at risk.
Sadly, it may take years – even decades – to see the results of our habits. Eating a piece of cheesecake won’t kill you…today. But if you eat junk food more often than not, eventually you will experience the consequences. It may be in the form of a fat body, high blood pressure, clogged arteries or high cholesterol, but you will see the results.
In this, the third installment in our series titled, “Weight Loss Motivation: How To Hit Your Fitness and Weight Loss Goals With Absolute Certainty” we’ll be taking a look at how your habits affect your ability to lose weight and get in shape.
Understanding How Habits Are Formed
When you experience a sight, sound, touch, feeling or thought for the first time, it gets stored in your brain as a memory. Stop and think about that. Everything you’ve consciously and unconsciously experienced up to this point in your life is locked up in that head of yours. That’s a lot of stuff!
Luckily, nature came up with an information management system to help you make sense of it all. So what is it that makes some memories…well…more memorable than others? Two things actually…
Emotion and repetition.
Commercials are the perfect example of how companies use repetition and emotion to influence our buying habits. They know that our lives are driven by the two emotions of pain and pleasure.
Here’s how they use this to their advantage:
First they create strong, positive emotions and then introduce their product as the way to achieve this state of bliss. Watch any commercial for exercise equipment and you’ll see a fit, sexy looking “regular” person showing off their exquisite physique and flexing their muscles, telling you that their product was responsible for their success. Listening to these people tell you that if they can do it so can you, you begin to feel hope; you feel that yes, you can do it. Then just when you’re feeling confident, they flash the number to call to place an order or to request their free demonstration video.
The other side of the coin has them using pain as their motivator. They make us feel strong negative emotions, then show how their product can alleviate our pain. This formula is particularly effective because as a rule, we will do more to avoid negative feelings than we will to experience positive ones. One such ad was for flood insurance. As the announcer spoke, the screen showed a nice home slowly being flooded with dirty water.
Leaving nothing to chance, the companies back-up their emotion evoking messages with the power of repetition. They know that one of the quickest ways to embed their message into your subconscious mind is to combine emotion with repetition.
Research has shown that if you hear something once, within four days you will forget 85% of what you heard. But if you hear the same information six to eight times over a period of one week, then one month later you will remember 90% or more of what you heard.
The Habit of Being Fat
To demonstrate how easily a fat habit, I’ll use a common activity that many people participate in – emotional eating.
In our society, we eat for a great variety of reasons. We eat when we’re sad, mad, bored, frustrated, lonely and stressed out. We eat when we’re excited, happy or feeling joyful. We celebrate tradition with food, as is the case with Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, The Super Bowl, and Monday Night Football.
When you stop to think about it, aren’t all of these reasons one form of habit or another? Why do I have turkey with stuffing and mashed potatoes every Christmas? It’s tradition. Isn’t tradition just another word for habit?
What about your daily eating? Is it habitual as well?
Let’s say that you’ve had a really stressful day at work. You get home and need to unwind and relax, so you grab a bag of chips, plunk yourself down on the couch and mindlessly start lifting chips into your mouth. Soon you begin to feel better – more relaxed. Here’s how this gets stored in your brain:
- I feel stressed.
- I eat chips.
- I no longer feel stressed.
If you make this a daily de-stress routine, it doesn’t take long for your brain to create a connection between eating chips and feeling better. In the future, when you feel stressed, your mind will automatically steer you towards food to relieve the tension.
The crazy thing is, the chips may have had nothing to do with making you feel relaxed. You may have become just as relaxed if you simply sat on the couch and sat quietly for a few minutes. But since the chips were present, they became part of your “feel good” formula.
How To Change Your Habits
Fortunately, the steps to changing your habits is simple…not easy…but simple:
1. Identify Current Negative Habits
Most people I have coached knew what they needed to do, they just weren’t doing it. At the same time, they knew what they were doing that they shoudn’t be. Take a piece of blank piece of paper and write down all the habits that have been holding you back. Examine not just your actions, but your thoughts and emotions as well. Here’s an example to get your thoughts moving:
Negative habit: Buying a donut or muffin for breakfast at the coffee shop on the way to work.
2. Define the habits that will help you get the results you want.
Want to know the lazy-person’s method to goal achievement? Find someone who has done what you want to do, and then do what they did to get there.
Seek people out who are become fit and stayed fit. Ask them how they did it. Not just physically, but mentally as well. Ask them how they think, what kind of self-talk they use as well as what they eat and how much they exercise.
If you can’t find or don’t want to approach someone in person, seek out the success stories of others and read them. Another brilliant idea would be to keep reading this site on a regular basis 
Positive Habit: Sit down at the table and eat a healthy, balanced breakfast before leaving for work.
3. Commit to putting your habits into action
At some point, the rubber’s got to meet the road. It won’t be easy at first. Establishing a new habit is just like pushing a car: difficult at first but it gets easier as it moves along.
So if we continue our example, here are a few actions you could take:
Action Steps:
- Get up 15 minutes earlier to give myself time to make breakfast.
- Go to the bookstore and library to find healthy cookbooks.
- Go grocery shopping to make sure I have the food I need in the fridge.
Always keep in mind that the habits you have now were, in many cases, formed over a lifetime. They won’t be overwritten in an instant.
Although, if you’ve taken the first two steps in this series, the changes may come more quickly than you ever imagined.
Link your new activity to as much emotion as possible and repeat the new action (thought, emotion) over and over again until it becomes second nature.
Be patient with yourself as you implement your new habits. While it may take you a few times doing something for it to become habit,the reality of it is it will take you three weeks or more for new habits to take hold.
Weight Loss Motivation: How To Hit Your Fitness and Weight Loss Goals With Absolute Certainty, Part I
Weight Loss Motivation: How To Hit Your Fitness and Weight Loss Goals With Absolute Certainty, Part II
