HABITS!
This is probably one of my favorite “keys” among the others —despite the importance of them all.
The power of practicing good habits are still mind blowing to me. Good habits can save you from falling into a rut causing you to lose your results or worse, take steps further back. And perhaps while I focus on health and fitness in these posts, habits apply to all things in life.
Practicing good habits can take the guess work out of a lot of things. If you frequently practice grabbing a glass of water then eating lean protein sources, unrefined carbohydrates, and veggies at most meals and eating slow during the meal, you have a pretty good chance of building that habit —considering you’re consistent. If you frequently snack in bed, that can become a habit that you automatically do when you go to bed each night. Once something is automated it becomes a second nature, good or bad. Obviously we want the good practices to be automated so we do them with little to no thought, we just do them and gain the positive benefits from them.
Think of coming home after a long, stressful, day. Instead of grabbing pizza, knowing that you’ll stay up to eat more because you have little self control with that food, you make something that won’t make you feel like you’re going to lose control with. Something that’s filling, nutritious and of course delicious. Imagine you do it with little or no thought. You’d be so proud of yourself for building the habits that support your goals of weight loss and perhaps better sleep!
Habit practicing is something I do with my clients to help them learn how to keep their results. It allows them to practice nutritious and healthy lifestyle supportive habits that can help them at any point in their life, with or without a coach.
I can sit here and write all about how much I love learning about building good habits and breaking bad ones but the ones I have to thank are Precision Nutritions very own John Berardi for sharing a book from James Clear called Atomic Habits. Personally, I thought it was a life changing read and can help you learn just about anything habit related. It’s practical approach to habits are very user friendly.
That being said, if you do decide to read Atomic Habits you'll see why habits are just so interesting! One of the key points I practice with my own client base is this:
When people are working towards a difficult goal but have trouble seeing this goal during hard times, I ask "who do you wish to become in X amount of time?". This is because the key point is "The most effective way to change your habits is to focus not on what you want to achieve, but on who you wish to become."
In 6 months will I have made outstanding progress on my new website blog if I only make it a habit to write a post every month? No, probably not. But, If I make a habit to identify as a writer and make a habit contract (another interesting & useful exerpt of the book) to write a new post once a week you bet I will!
This isn’t a “shout-out” post but not sharing my sources would be a disservice to you, the readers. Hope you enjoyed this post, happy reading!
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