First I thought, well I need to tell people
you need to eat vegetables, and you need to do all
the things Sandra just said. You need to exercise
and you need to focus on these healthy behaviors.
But turns out most people can't do that, that's really hard.
And so as I spoke with people I started hearing what the real problems are with
trying to get healthy. So let me know if any of these sound familiar who's too busy with work
to do this stuff. Right or I would hear things like it's too expensive, fresh food and
vegetables are way too expensive. I'm just too tired I can't do it. I hate vegetables. I can't,
I can't eat healthy. Self-talk, I don't have the willpower I don't have the discipline.
It can't be done. Or social reasons, everybody else
does it I can't change. Or my family won't do it,
the biggest, the biggest one of all. So at the end of the day there are people
who are more busy than you, have less time than you,
have less money than you and can still eat healthy
and do these healthy behaviors. So really at the end of the day it's an issue of psychology and
not of nutrition. And so what's important then is
focusing on your brain because as Sandra explained
you need to get these behaviors down. You know if you stop thinking about the diet, stop thinking
about the number on the scale, at the end of the day you just need to do the things that make
you healthy. Some people will lose weight, you can
probably get to the bottom of your defended range
or at least you know near there, you can
lose a few pounds. I lost weight, you lost weight
too, right? When you started doing it you do lose
weight you might not lose 150 pounds but you will
feel so much better and you will look better, you
will be healthier and that should become the goal.
But one of the reasons the diets fail, you can't rely on willpower, right? You can't rely
on willpower to do these things it's too hard because a diet like she said, it's 24
hours a day. So instead I propose we focus on habits. And today I'm going to describe to you
how to do that. So the habits are the diet antidote. For starters, ninety percent
of the food choices you already make are habit-based. The cool thing about habits is
once they're formed they happen automatically. You don't have to think about them that's what
a habit is. And they don't require willpower, once they are formed. Habits are lasting.
Good habits are just as hard to break as bad ones.
When I can't go to the gym for several days in a
row I go absolutely crazy. And you think that fitness people are just a different breed but
that's not true. Once you start to really find a physical activity you love it's addicting.
You really want to keep doing it not because you have to and not because you want to lose weight.
And habits are brilliant because they evoke the 80 / 20 principle which means that if you're
doing the right thing most of the time what you do occasionally doesn't matter so much.
So if it's your birthday, if it's your anniversary you can go have
a glass of champagne and a slice of cake and you don't have to feel bad about it.
So quick description of how habits work, what distinguishes a habit from
a regular, any other action that you take, any
other behavior, is that it's got three components.
One is the cue, or trigger, which is the thing that
initiates the action. Then you have the action that
follows and then there's always a reward at the end. The reward is the special part because
what it does is it tells your brain keep doing that. It reinforces that cue and so the reward
and the cue are paired and what they do is they initiate the action. Does that make sense?
So that reinforcement is what's very powerful in the habit loop. And you can read all about this
in a wonderful book called The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. He describes the golden
rule of habit change which is pairing the same trigger with the same reward and just scripting
a new action in the middle. So rather than trying
to use willpower you reshape your habits and then
healthiness will follow. And this typically takes, I mean there's a lot of rumors out
there about how long it takes to form a new habit, it really depends on the habit, and on you.
But typically two weeks to six months is your typical range for forming new habits.