HEALTHY HABITS OF EATING
Eating well and cooking for yourself are two of the healthiest habits to start. How do you form these along with healthy habits for sleep? It’s a lot easier to add new healthy habits instead of stopping bad ones that are established. Healthy habits help you to get stronger faster and lead to a more fulfilling and healthful life. What if there were a healthy habits program?
Getting healthy isn't only about nutrition but if you get some positive momentum with your diet, you might stretch the next morning, get better sleep at night, or just be in a better mood because you are taking control of your life. You're no longer a spectator but an active participant in what makes you feel good and allows you to perform at a high level.
Your current level of health and happiness results from the habits you’ve developed and followed over your lifetime. Logically, what you repeatedly do defines who you are.
INSPIRING WEIGHT LOSS STORIES
Any story you read about how someone turned their life or health around starts at the beginning with a new habit:
- Walk every day for 20 minutes
- Start the day with a healthy breakfast
- Drink one soda a day instead of two
- Don’t eat anything after 8 pm
Forming these habits leads to additional healthy habit formation. Incremental positive change leads to more energy, less pain, a steadier mood, and more restful sleep, leading to more positive change!
CREATING POSITIVE MOMENTUM
So how do we get moving with these healthy habits?
From Psychology Today: “Habit formation is how behaviors become automatic. Habits can form without a person intending to acquire them, but they can also be deliberately cultivated or eliminated to better suit one’s personal goals.”
It’s clear from that snippet that while habits may be formed subconsciously, you can override them or create new ones by deliberately focusing on habit creation. It’s not a matter of willpower; we just need to form new habits, so they become the new normal.
HABIT FORMATION
Psychology has defined the three Rs of change. Every habit you have follows the same pattern:
- Reminder is the trigger
- Routine is the action you take (behavior)
- Reward is the benefit you gain from doing the behavior
When you are stressed or tired, do you reach for a sugary snack to boost your energy and get a short-term hit of the feel-good hormone dopamine? This "system" is undermining your long-term health goals and happiness.
You need to set up a new system to form a routine with a reward aligned with your health. Simply saying I want to eat healthier will not enable you to override your existing habits. Eating healthier is the goal, forming new habits allow you to achieve your goal.
Think of a path you follow daily through a wooded area. It may not be the best path to take, and you don’t end up in the most scenic area, but it’s well-worn and easy to follow, so you follow it every day like clockwork.
What if you decided to take a more difficult path that leads to a waterfall? The new way is very narrow, and you have to fight through the brush. Your speed is roughly half of what it would be on the well-worn path. You fight through and make it to the waterfall. You feel empowered, and your reward is a view of the waterfall.
You decide to take the new path to the waterfall from now on, and the hike becomes easier. You start to anticipate the view, and the path becomes well-worn. Your new default behavior is to follow this path while the old one becomes overgrown. It takes some effort initially, but once you solidify the new habit, it becomes effortless and fulfilling.
WHAT ABOUT OUR GENES
You may be thinking that’s all well and good, but life gave me an inferior genetic hand to play. Genes influence our overall health, but they are not your destiny. Epigenetics is a field of study about how your environment and behaviors affect your gene's response. There are many future versions of you, and they’re impacted by the decisions you make every day. You are not sentenced to hypertension, cancer, arthritis, etc.
Your choices throughout your life have a significant impact on your health, happiness, and longevity. Reducing sugar intake and employing intermittent fasting are just two changes you can undertake to lower your odds of all diseases and have the added benefit of reducing body fat.
Every incremental healthy habit you adopt should be celebrated, no matter how small.
These initial habits lead to more impactful changes as the positive momentum takes hold.
Don’t wait; write down some small changes you can make today, and you’ll be amazed at what you can accomplish.