Better habits instead of akratic failure. ( Part two in my series ‘How to form and maintain better habits’ ).
Willpower, nurture, and nature.
Pure raw willpower is wonderful to have, but rarely the solution when you are trying to create better habits that will last the test of time.
At least not for most people.
A better way that will help everyone tremendously so, even those that have unyielding poise and mental fortitude is to acknowledge and adjust for the external contributors that fuel your less desired habits.
Ask yourself, is work and its long hours and stress exhausting you to the point that you always end up skipping the gym and ordering takeout to go that you seemingly devour in one fell bite, instead of going to the gym, and enjoying a healthier homemade meal in a calmer and slower way afterward?
In this case, your work-life balance, or in truth, the lack of a healthy balance, is fueling your sedentary gym-free life as well as your less desirable food habits. Overworking and feeling perpetually stressed takes a huge toll on everyone. Consequentially allowing far less room and energy for making healthier food, life, relationship, and fitness habits.
In other words, in this particular example, instead of thinking of yourself as a man-child failure for not manning up and going to the gym anyway, and having homemade post-gym food, try to secure a better work-life balance.
Because it’s that imbalance that is sucking your energy away, well, external factors can be a lot of other things too, and perhaps your work is a healthy, joyful addition to your life, and not at all your issue.
But it´s a fairly common issue in many people’s lives, and as such it’s an excellent example for this article.
The solution and the problem.
Changing the actual problem instead of the symptoms makes it much easier to create room, time, and energy for creating better habits in all aspects of life.
Or to reduce the probability of failing those healthier habits over time.
The latter example of reducing the probability of failing our healthy fit habits is what we do when we clean our home from alcohol, candy, cakes, crisps, and all forms of lower quality foods and temptations, and replace them with frozen veggies, fresh whole fruits, protein-rich, high satiety foods without added sugar et cetera.
Perhaps you are an omnivore who loves eggs and poultry. If so, stock up on eggs and frozen poultry too.
As we discussed in article one, what we have in our home is what we will eventually eat. So reduce the temptations, and lower the threshold for making healthier food choices by having those things at home.
This simple act of cleaning our home from hedonistic temptations and lower-quality nutrition makes it so much harder to binge eat or succumb to a frenzied and indulgent feeding urge that will trigger you to pick up 5 liters of ice cream the next day when you drive home from work instead of going to the gym and buying some apples on your way home.
It might sound trivial, but this is human nature and these small, simple habit-shaping steps work surprisingly well for almost everyone.
In other words.
Willpower is great to have and develop.
But forming and maintaining better habits in life, the kitchen, the gym, and your relationship can be made so much easier and smoother by accepting the huge influence external factors play in our lives first, and secondly adjusting those external contributors.
The second layer of habit-forming techniques.
A second layer of tools that helps people maintain their healthier habits at this stage is to set your healthy fit choices in stone.
This works especially well when you add it as a second layer on top of the previously mentioned adjustment you made to your environment ( adjusting the external contributors ).
This second layer of habit-shaping “tools” works like this.
We do not haggle with ourselves if we should go to work or not. We just do it because it’s a work day, and we do it no matter if it’s sunny outside or if the skies are blessed with rainbows and clouds, snow or rain.
We go to work even when we do not feel like it.
Treat your gym days the exact same way. As non-negotiable set pieces in your life.
In other words.
It’s Monday so it is your leg, calves, and biceps day. It’s Tuesday so it is your chest and shoulder day.
It’s Wednesday so it is jogging, swimming, or MMA et cetera. Best of all, when you do this, you do not wake up early bird style on Tuesday only to find yourself having to negotiate with your lazy worm that´s hiding deep inside all of us.
It´s Tuesday, so you know what´s up. This reduces the inertia of getting to the gym, and it lowers the threshold of successfully making that healthy fit choice.
To further cement this you set your entire gym and fitness week in stone instead of just deciding on the day. Create pre-determined workouts with exercises, sets, and rir per set.
Don’t tell yourself what weights and reps to do, but decide upon the number of days per week, the exercises, the volume per workout and week ( sets ), and decide on the reps in reserve you will use for the current workout phase, and do all of this ahead of time.
You give yourself a number of days per week that you train, and you don’t negotiate with yourself. You just do it, like your job. And you give yourself a preset number of rest days per week too. This together with the amount of sets per workout and exercise and muscle group creates a roadmap that increases your chances of sticking to it.
Assess and adjust as you go once or twice per month, or weekly if that´s how you roll.
Likewise, you set your food plan in motion the same way. You create a menu of pre-set meals for each day, with a healthy alternative here and there, made from a basic set of healthy food items that you keep at home and cook and prep for several days at a time.
This makes it very easy to only buy the food items and ingredients that you need, and cook and prep for many days at a time. Reducing hedonistic tendencies, poor nutritional intake, and overeating all while allowing you to make it far more likely that you will stick with your healthy long-term food habits far more frequently.
And the takeaway food? The treats and hedonistic food choices that used to make up your entire food universe.
These things are no different than any other unhelpful external contributor. So if you can remove it completely, cherish that.
But most people neither can’t nor wish to go cold turkey on all of their indulgences because food also has emotional properties and cultural value and meaning for people, couples, families, and entire neighborhoods.
Food matters not just for its nutrition, health, and fitness impact and that is important to acknowledge when you feel hesitant to remove something. Just don’t close your eyes to its fact-based impact on your health, and wellbeing.
So if it is bad, reduce it accordingly. No one should be allowed to guilt trip you into upholding unhealthy habits and neither should traditions be allowed to harm your ongoing health and fitness journey. It´s your well-being and continued health progression we are talking about after all.
Reducing however, doesn’t mean that you can’t indulge at all. If you still wish to hold on to some of that. Remove the guilt and create a healthy balance that you can maintain.
If that is you, give yourself space for these indulgences, one meal per week, or once, every other week, once per month, or even less.
At first, you might opt for two meals per week, and over time as your new and more desirable food and life habits take root with far better nutrition, better satiety, and far less hedonistic tendencies you will find it quite manageable to reduce those indulgent meals even further.
Until one day they might be nothing more than a distant, shallow memory that you neither need nor crave anymore.
But even if you keep some treats in your life for a rare but regular indulgence, perfection is never required to keep on track, so it is ok to enjoy a rarer treat. It´s the volume and frequency of those treats that send people’s health and fitness trajectories in the wrong direction.
Best of all, this all means that when your life balance and habits are healthy and good enough, you can, if you still want to, make room for a rarer treat without guilt or fear or negative outcomes for your health, body composition, or fitness progression because the sum of it all is within the fact-based limits of your body and life and the progression you wish to maintain.
To summarize.
You do not need perfect habits to drop body fat, build muscles, and improve your health. You just need a good enough effort and food choices happening often enough.
Embrace that and identify the external factors you need to adjust first of all to kick-start a lifelong journey of better habits.