Hey guys, first time poster here. I've been lurking for a while, but I haven't seen this concept mentioned. It's helped me, so I thought I'd share.
For those of us who not only need to drop some lbs/kg, but also change our habits, the best metaphor I've seen that helped me is the snowball method. Essentially, we have a finite amount of willpower/mental energy at our fingertips at any one time, but we have multiple habits we need to change or adopt. So, what do you do? Focus on one change to establish consistency and cement as habit, while using any extra energy to try to do a new one.
For example, I needed to lose fat, learn to exercise regularly, build muscle, and drop the unhealthy carbs that made the most of my diet.
What helped me make progress was to work predominately on establishing a calorie deficit until that became habit and if I had a day of extra motivation or energy, I would try a work out. Now that I understands how to measure and weigh foods to calculate calories, tracking them has become a breeze as I eat the same foods routinely. So now, I am trying to get my body into the habit of exercising regularly. It is a challenge to make myself work out 5 times a week, but I've been working up to that goal adding a day of exercise each week. If I find myself extra ambitious, I research a new recipe to try to help ease my dependency on carbs. Recently, I've found that roasted Brussel sprouts are yummy! While they could never replace my Pillsbury Crescent rolls (heaven), they are a great substitute for me using Bushes baked beans at most meals.
Gradually, the snowball of healthy habits gets bigger with time as I add new routines and build on prior progress. Growing up, I always thought you had to be all healthy, or all couch slob. I thought if you didn't want to be couch slob, you immediately have to start working out 150 mins a week, do two days of strength training, eat 1200 Calories, and only eat 30% carbs. So I would try to change everything at once, make it three days, then quit. Turns out, sugar is addicting and hard to give up, work outs are strenuous if you're out of shape and overweight, and sticking to new behaviors is a beast. So, I've been focusing on tackling things one at a time, and adding new habits on as I find the mental fortitude to do so. I'm 60lbs/28kg down in a year, healthiest I've ever been since elementary school, and worked out 4 days this week (so far)!
For me, the expectation of perfect performance is the enemy of consistent progress. (Heard that somewhere, don't know where, or I'd give credit here where it's due.)
I am sure this is obvious to many of you, but for me, Captain Oblivious, it took me 20 years to figure out. So, if this post helps any one person, it's worth it to me. Good luck everyone! Happy Snowballing!
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/loseit/comments/mnwuts/changing_habits_snowball/
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