A few weeks ago I wrote that I had read a great book called ‘The Power of Less’ by Leo Babauta. It was a great read and reinforced many things that James has said to me and the UR community over the years and I wanted to share another piece with you that I’m sure you will find useful on your own health and fitness journey.
What we want is a plan that isn’t difficult to adopt, and even more importantly, is something you can stick with for years. It might not get you instant results, but those aren’t the results you want anyway. Any plan that gets you dramatic results within a short time is bad because it is too drastic, and no one can stick with a drastic plan, because it is too drastic, and no one can stick with a drastic plan for very long. Soon, you fall off such a drastic plan, and those dramatic results you achieved are reversed in just as dramatic a fashion.
Real health and fitness come over months and years. Lasting change is made gradually, in small increments, in a way that you can sustain for life. And so our plan will be something that will start slowly but will be sustainable for much longer than more drastic plans.
Conventional wisdom says that diet is about 80 percent of weight loss, and to a large extent that’s true because you can lose weight with a good diet and no exercise, but it’s really hard to lose weight on a bad diet with exercise. But we’re going to turn that on its head for two reasons:
⦁ We’re not just looking to lose weight, but to get fit and in good shape, and for that, you need both exercise and diet; and
⦁ If you start with exercise, the diet will eventually follow. It’s hard to exercise without at least wanting to eat right, so we’re going to start with exercise.
So our simple fitness plan is this:
Use the first month to focus exclusively on forming the exercise habit. Don’t worry about the diet at this point, although you can start eating healthier foods if you like. But the habit of exercise is our focus. We want to make it as regular and as important as brushing your teeth. We will start small and focus on making it a regular thing, rather than going all out this first month.
The second month, while continuing the exercise habit we’ll focus on making gradual, healthy changes to our diet.
Every month thereafter, we will set short-term goals for gradual improvements in our exercise and diet plans. We will reward ourselves each month for our progress, and stay accountable to others for our fitness plan.
STEP 1: FORMING THE EXERCISE HABIT
Forming the exercise habit doesn’t have to be a monumental task. It’s like forming any other habit-you just need to be consistent about it. The Spanish have a proverb, that habits start out as cobwebs and grow to be cables. So we will start by laying thin strings and gradually add to those strings until we have cables.
Of course, if you have any health risks, such as heart or lung problems serious illness, or pregnancy, please check with a doctor before starting any exercise program.
Here’s the plan:
1. Start light – Start your workout plan as easy as possible until you’ve learned to stick to it. You can gradually increase your exercise later, but at first, it is vitally important that you hold yourself back. In the first week, just do five to ten minutes of cardio-fast walking, running, cycling, or swimming. Only five to ten minutes, and no more. You will want to do more, most likely, but don’t. The next week, increase your time by five minutes and do that every week for the first month so that by the end of the month you’re doing twenty-five minutes for each workout. If this seems like too little to you, don’t worry: after it becomes a habit you can do more. Focus on forming the habit first.
2. Schedule your workout time – This is crucial – figure out a time when you will be able to exercise when nothing will interfere. For most people, morning is the best time, because evening workouts are often cancelled due to social engagements or other obligations. But for some people, working out right after work is best, and for others, a lunchtime workout works well. Choose the time that works best for you, and create space in your schedule for your workouts. The first week, you just need to schedule three workouts – give yourself thirty minutes, as the workout appointment always takes longer than the workout itself. The second and third weeks, schedule four workouts, and the fourth week, schedule five workouts. Try to stay with five workouts a week from then on, as this is the best way to get in good shape. This is important: Treat these workout appointments as your most important appointments of the day. Don’t let anything get in the way of them.
3. Don’t allow yourself to miss a day – Just about the only good reasons to miss a workout are sickness or injury. Otherwise, don’t let yourself skip a workout. These workouts are so light, in the beginning, that they shouldn’t be tiring you out too much. If you’re tired from a long day’s work, just start the workout-you’ll be glad you did. If you start skipping workouts, you will soon make a habit of not exercising, instead of the other way around. When forming a habit, you must be consistent. Remember, it’s just like brushing your teeth – do it for your health, do it regularly, and just do it.
4. Don’t give up – Even more important than not missing a day is sticking with the program. If for some reason you do miss a day or two, don’t stop. Get back on the program. If you miss more than a couple of days, back up the program a week or two and start working on forming the habit again. If you get discouraged and stop, motivate yourself and start again. Failure is not as important as starting again after you fail and sticking with it for the long term.
5. Get a partner if you can – This isn’t mandatory, but if you can find a reliable partner, it makes it a bit easier. First, having someone to talk to while you exercise makes the time go by much more quickly. Second, if you make an appointment to meet that person for your workout, you’re more likely to stick to the appointment rather than wimp out.
6. Be accountable to others – This is how you motivate yourself to stick with the program – no one wants to look bad in front of others. Commit publicly, to your friends or the entire world via a blog, and stick with the program. Keep a strict workout and eating log, and make it public. Share it with as many people as possible. Let the light shine where once there was darkness, and that accountability will motivate you.
7. Enjoy yourself – Very mandatory. If you don’t enjoy yourself, you’ll never stick with it. So try to have as much fun as possible. Enjoy getting fit and healthy! Enjoy burning off your fat! Enjoy the sweat! Enjoy the relaxation of burning off stress! Exercise should be fun, not torture
That’s the plan to form the exercise habit. It’s pretty simple actually – create the time to work out, start easy, and stick with it without fail. Soon, exercise will become such a regular part of your life you’ll never want to go back to being sedentary again.
Simple Fitness Plan
STEP 2: MAKING GRADUAL HEALTHY DIET CHANGES
After your month of forming the exercise habit, it’s time to start focusing on your eating habits. If you already eat fairly healthily, you can modify this to suit your needs, and try to make further improvements in your diet gradually. If you don’t eat too healthily now, you don’t want to make drastic changes – small, gradual changes over time are better and more sustainable.
Here’s your plan:
1. Eat when you are lightly hungry. Not when you’re ravenous. That means eating every three to four hours and paying more attention to your hunger. If you’re getting hungry, eat. Action steps: Plan meals every three to four hours, be more aware of your hunger, and pack snacks or meals for on the road. This is your plan for the first week – don’t worry about the next steps until after the first week.
2. Eat light foods. Nothing too heavy, except cheat meals (schedule this once a week). Lots of fruit and veggies, whole grains, beans and nuts. Fresh food is much better than processed. Action steps: Make a list of healthy meals and snacks with real, whole foods – things you like that are healthy. Turn them into meal plans – several days’ worth of meals and snacks. You’ll start on this the second week, but don’t change your entire diet overnight. This week, just try eating more fruits and veggies or cut out sodas and other sweet drinks. The next week, make another change, perhaps eliminating some junk food you eat regularly, or cooking a healthier dinner. Aim to gradually have a diet that consists of very little junk food or fast food, mostly whole grains, low-fat dairy or soy milk products, and lean protein (lean meat, chicken, fish, tofu, or other vegetable protein). Be sure to find foods you enjoy eating, or you’ll have a difficult time – this is very important.
3. Eat slowly. Savour the food. Don’t cram it down. Eating slowly will help you not to get overfull, and will help you enjoy your food more. Focus on this step in the third week while continuing the first two steps.
4. Eat until you’re lightly full. Not stuffed. Stop before you’re full, and wait ten minutes to see if you’re still hungry. This is a crucial step, and you’ll focus on it in the fourth week while continuing the progress you’ve made in the first few weeks.
No dieting, no restricted foods, all good stuff. This plan is really about learning how to eat healthier, and to feel lighter all the time. Remember to take it one step at a time!
Fitness Plan – Part 3
STEP 3: CONTINUATION, SHORT-TERM GOALS AND ACCOUNTABILITY
Now that you’ve gotten started with the habits of exercise and healthy eating, you’ll want to continue the program and gradually improve both areas. This can be a dangerous time for many people, as they lose motivation if they don’t see big results. So to keep you from losing motivation, and to keep you sticking to the program to see the long-term results, we’ll do the following:
1. Continue to gradually increase exercise, adding variety. Crank it up, but only slowly. Once you’ve gotten used to exercise, you’ll want to first lengthen your workouts to thirty to forty minutes, and then do some higher intensity ones for better fitness and fat burning. For example, instead of running slowly and steadily, for a long time, try doing shorter bursts of fast running, with periods of rest in between. You can do this for any exercise. Higher intensity increases calorie burn and improves performance. But you can’t do it as long, and you shouldn’t do it every workout. Mix it up with endurance workouts. Also, try signing up for a 5k or other type of short race – it adds motivation and fun.
2. Continue to eat healthier, also adding variety and flavor. Each week, make one healthy change to your diet. Pack healthy snacks for work. Pack healthy lunches for work. Eat a healthier breakfast. Eat out less and cook more. Pack healthy snacks when you go out on the road. Drink more water. Cut out some type of unhealthy food. One by one, change your eating habits to healthier ones. Doing it gradually like this makes it much easier and much more likely to stick. To add variety, be sure to try out new recipes and new fruits and veggies and snacks, and when you find ones you like, add them to your regular rotation. Never stop trying new healthy foods and recipes!
3. Set short-term goals. Real. Lasting change only happens over a long period – months and years. But it’s hard to stay motivated for something that long. Instead, set a short-term goal or two each month. Maybe set a goal each week if that helps. Some examples of short-term goals: Increase your workouts by five minutes each day this week. Lose a pound a week. Lose an inch off your waist. Run a 5k. Get your total workout time to two-and-a-half hours this week. Do a long run of five miles on Saturday. As you can see, the possibilities for short-term goals are almost endless. Set one every week or two to keep yourself motivated. Share your goals with others.
4. Hold yourself accountable. Log your eating and exercise daily. This is the key habit. If you can log your workout, you will start to see your progress, and it will motivate you to keep going. And you have to make it a habit to log it right away. Don’t put it off and say you’ll do it before you go to bed. As soon as you’re done working out, log it. No exceptions. And don’t make the log complicated – that will only make you resist doing the log. Just the date, time, and what you did. This is also important: Put your log online, on a blog, or through one of many online logs available, so that others can see what you’ve been doing. Give the address of your log to as many people as you can, and encourage them to check on it and leave comments. The accountability will keep you motivated to keep going.
5. Reward yourself. Rewards are best if they are frequent in the beginning. Be self-indulgent! Even sweets are good rewards – get into the habit of exercise, and weight loss will come eventually. Celebrate every little success.
What You Don’t Know About Willpower
I have always struggled with willpower, to the point that I feel I don’t have any!! For example – I will be sat in a restaurant with the dessert menu in front of me. I would just have eaten a lovely meal which fulfilled my appetite but I can not bring myself to say NO to the amazing desserts on offer.
So I was very pleased to find the blog below written by Krista Scott-Dixon on the Precision Nutrition website. I will be changing my mindset around willpower and following the steps Krista provides. I hope it helps you too…….
Most people think of willpower as a resource that runs dry… and then you’re just out of luck. But here’s the truth — and a much more hopeful approach.
There’s a reason why 6 out of 10 big, sweeping promises to change end up failing within three months. Or, a few reasons.
⦁ Some folks try to introduce too much change all at once.
⦁ Others never create a solid action plan to work from in the first place.
⦁ Yet others fail to address life patterns that reinforce old habits.
But there’s one key factor that plays a central role in making or breaking our ability to change. And as a culture, we just don’t understand it.
I think it’s time we talk about willpower.
Improving your life — whether that means quitting smoking, losing weight, or getting a handle on your disaster of an inbox — requires change. And to make change happen, we usually go straight to our old friend willpower.
The internal conversation usually goes something like this:
Wake up, willpower, I’ve got a bunch of jobs for you! First I need you to get me out of bed at 5:30 am. Then you’ve got to get me out the door for a run. Also, don’t let me eat any sugar today. And while you’re at it, help me keep my mouth shut the next time my boss says something stupid.
Sound familiar?
We draw on willpower a lot. But what is it, exactly? Why does it seem to fail us? And, most importantly, how can we make it work better (or, if you’re a personal trainer, make it work better for your clients)?
How we think of willpower
You may know it by a few different names:
⦁ determination
⦁ drive
⦁ restraint
⦁ resolve
⦁ self-discipline
⦁ self-control
⦁ resilience
⦁ can-do spirit
The common thread: They all make your palms sweat and your mouth go dry when forcing yourself to do something you really don’t want to do.
Definitions of willpower include similarly discomforting concepts:
⦁ the ability to delay gratification, resisting short-term temptations to meet long-term goals
⦁ the capacity to override an unwanted thought, feeling, or impulse
⦁ the ability to employ a “cool” cognitive system of behavior rather than a “hot” emotional system
⦁ conscious, effortful regulation of the self by the self
⦁ a limited resource capable of being depleted
Willpower: Impossible
That last definition, in particular, is interesting. Because, you see, it might not be true.
We used to think that willpower was a limited resource, something that we use up until it’s gone.
That’s the belief we fall back on when, after eating chicken and broccoli all week long, we find ourselves knee-deep in nachos and margaritas at 7 PM on Friday night.
My (depleted) willpower made me do it!
Thankfully, discoveries in willpower research have revealed that this viewpoint falls short.
Before we get into the new research, here’s a crash course on what we thought we knew… until recently.
Is willpower a finite resource?
University of Kentucky psychology professor Suzanne Segerstrom began researching the biological basis of willpower in the early 2000s. Studying physiologic correlations, Segerstrom found that heart rate variability (HRV) increases when people call on their willpower.
From there, a study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology showed that using willpower fatigues participants. In another, stamina was shown to be depleted.
Florida State University professor Matthew Gailliot then proposed that the mind and body pull the same resources for fuel, suggesting that willpower uses glucose. Though arguable, Gailliot’s research at least suggested that individuals with high glucose resources would have more self-control.
Follow-up studies showed that having too many choices — say, at a buffet — decreases our ability to restrain ourselves. The take-home: Limit your options if you want to conserve your willpower.
From these studies and other data, we get the picture that willpower is a limited resource. That we must prioritize our willpower-requiring activities since we’ll likely run out.
Countless books and strategies have been written on the subject.
The first wave of books was a bit fatalistic: If willpower is a biologically limited entity, it’s not our fault if we run out. Not very hopeful — and practically useless when it comes to making big life changes.
The second wave was a bit better. These compared willpower to a muscle, suggesting that it can be strengthened. So authors shared all sorts of strategies for doing so.
Here’s the only problem with all this: The willpower-as-limited-resource narrative is only half right. Which means it’s also half wrong.
Change your beliefs on willpower, change everything
In more recent studies, one thing stands out: Willpower is surprisingly simple to boost.
So easy that merely suggesting to people that willpower works cumulatively, rather than being a finite resource, can be enough to improve the numbers.
In one study from Stanford, researchers gave subjects the prompt, “Sometimes, working on a strenuous mental task can make you feel energized for further challenging activities.”
Simply sending the message that willpower can build on itself rather than run out was enough to get people to be significantly more successful at the tasks at hand.
Staggering, isn’t it?
I’m not saying this is going to work like a charm every time. But it does reveal the power of our perception when it comes to finding motivation.
Where willpower can take us from here
Okay, willpower is indeed a finite resource. You will run out of it if you use too much.
But only if you believe that’s how willpower works.
(Gasp.)
What happens if you believe the opposite — that doing something requiring willpower can drive you to accomplish even more? Well, amazing things happen.
For example, when the Stanford researchers asked 153 college students about their attitudes regarding motivation and willpower, the ones who felt that willpower was a limited resource felt “depleted” after a difficult task.
Yet the students who felt that willpower was cumulative did better on every subsequent task given.
As the saying goes, nothing seems to succeed like success.
From here, anything is possible. Excelling at something in one area of life might lead to a whole chain of successes in seemingly unrelated areas.
For instance, a good test score could lead to improved academic growth, which could lead to procrastinating less, which could even lead to things like healthy eating or sticking to a budget more effectively.
Well played, brain. Well played.
What does this mean for you?
Just like every other life situation, our own self-talk and beliefs determine how we handle difficult situations.
This means that how you think about willpower can actually translate to how you act, and that can mean better results.
For example, if you’re having trouble finding the motivation to get to the gym, or you’re tired of white-knuckling yourself away from the refrigerator, try simply re-framing the situation.
Tell yourself that every time you work on a challenging task you become more capable of rocking the next one.
That mindset alone can make you feel more empowered.
Oh, and if you’re a coach, this is powerful stuff.
You can use it to help your clients think about motivation differently, so they feel energized and empowered, rather than fatigued and exhausted as they make big changes in their lives. With your guidance, they can act more consistently, and see better results.
What to do next?
Think about your understanding of willpower. How do you define it? How do you think it works? Consider how your definition of willpower affects your actions.
1. Try giving yourself a prompt to encourage a different view of willpower and motivation. Use the one from the study I mentioned (“Sometimes, working on a strenuous mental task makes me feel energized for further challenging activities”), or put your own spin on it (“Following through on my new habits makes me feel like a rockstar who’s capable of anything”).
2. Consider how a different view of willpower might help you with challenges like:
⦁ nutrition consistency
⦁ sticking to a workout routine
⦁ preparing meals ahead of time
1. The next time you feel like you’ve exhausted your willpower, ask yourself: How can I reframe what willpower means for me? What successes have I already achieved? How can I draw energy from those successes?