Start small to make healthy habits stick!
I have a confession to make. I love sensational television. When I was a kid, I watched soap operas regularly. General Hospital was my favorite. This was before the age of DVR and I was a student. So, I had to be pretty dedicated to keep up with it. But it did help that neither the plot lines nor the characters changed very quickly.
But eventually I stopped watching GH. For me, the magic was gone. But I still like dramatic television. Now, it’s most often “reality” tv like The Real World (yes, I just dated myself), The Bachelor(ette), or The Real Housewives … I find them incredibly entertaining! I confess! But I never watched one of the biggest reality television shows in history, The Biggest Loser. It was … too much for me. And that’s saying a lot! Because … The Bachelorette is just too much!
The Biggest Loser was hugely popular! It was one of the most successful reality television shows ever and absolutely the most popular weight-loss show ever. It had a really long run! … from 2004 to 2016. And that says a lot! The world was watching! And so the creators are bringing it back in 2020!
The Biggest Loser isn’t a documentary-style show; it’s a weight-loss competition. Originally, each season lasted 7 months and featured a group of morbidly obese contestants vying to lose the most weight. Season after season, each winner and the runners-up, had huge transformations. They dieted severely. They exercised excessively. Maybe the contestants were dehydrated. Maybe even medicated. But the outcome was real. During each season finale, the winner would reveal that he or she lost approximately half their body weight. Half their body weight! The Biggest Loser would win $250,000 and possibly some brand deals and be released into the world.
And that’s where it got tricky - when the contestants left the microcosm of reality television and re-entered the real world. The majority of the winners regained most of the weight they lost. Here are two examples:
Ryan Benson, the winner of season 1, lost 122 pounds to be the champion. Recently, he shared that he gained at least 90 pounds back within 2 years. He’s now at his starting weight. He admitted, “No one sees me get an apple pie in the drive-through.” One more example is Ali Vincent. She was the first female winner, and she astonishingly lost 112 pounds. Today, you can see her all over the internet, tearfully confessing that she gained almost all of it back. She thinks out loud, “I never thought I’d weigh over 200 pounds again.”
So, why didn’t these jaw-dropping weight losses stick? Is it biology like genetics and hormones? Maybe, in part. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) even wrote an article about this in 2016. You can read it here, you little brainiac. But I’d like to make a case for the importance of healthy habits. The winners of The Biggest Loser made massive changes in their lives to achieve massive weight loss. But if the weight loss didn’t stick, does it matter? They had a life-changing experience, but was it worth it? Each winner won a big chunk of money, yes. But their health is worth much more than that. And health is what they’re still chasing.
“Success is the product of daily habits, not once in a lifetime transformations.” - James Clear
So, how do you make healthy habits stick? Keep a goal in mind but don’t make the goal your end-all-be-all. Instead, stay focused on your goal while being even more focused on the process of getting there. The now-disappointed winners of The Biggest Loser focused on weight loss but not on habits. They lost weight, but their success was fleeting because being hungry all the time and working out 4 hours a day is not sustainable! So, while their new weight might’ve been healthy, their weight loss system wasn’t.
If you want to change your life, change your lifestyle. And real lifestyle changes happen step by step.
“Dream big. Start small.” - Simon Sinek
Do you think a big dream, like a health transformation, has to feel big or overwhelming? Well, it doesn’t. In fact, I think that feeling is a bit of a trap. When a dream feels big, it can convince you that you need a big plan. And if you’re not ready for a big plan, that big feeling can convince you that you shouldn’t chase after your dream now. It can convince you to wait.
That’s why starting small has such power. When you start small, the action feels simple. It feels do-able or even easy. So, you do it. And completing that action brings about a positive outcome. And that feels good. This is what Stephen Covey calls a small win. It’s a micro success, small in stature but big in meaning.
When you get a small win, you want more of it. So you do it again and again until you’re doing it automatically. It becomes a habit. And feeling good about mastering this new, small habit makes you more likely to build other small habits … to achieve other small wins. You feel a little better every day, day after day, step by step, thanks to a number of small habits.
And what would you call a bunch of small habits stacked on top of each other? I would call it a system. Before you know it, you have a process, a plan to follow all the way to your goal. This plan is like using a staircase to help you climb a big ol’ mountain. Or maybe it’s like an escalator. Climbing it feels possible, even probable. At first, you won’t see the summit of the mountain. But as you climb, the summit will come into view. Small successes get you up the mountain. And when you multiply them, you can achieve a big success. You can and will reach the top of the mountain! And you can stay on the mountaintop because being up there is second nature to you now. You live there. It’s your lifestyle.
The 1% Rule
Have you heard of the 1% Rule? I’ve heard both Jasmine Star, the CEO of Social Curator, and James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, describe it so well. But for now, consider this graphic from Atomic Habits as you continue to read.
Imagine vowing to yourself that you would make your eating habits 1% better every day … whatever that means to you. At the end of day 1, you might not feel like a whole new woman! (But my most dedicated Healthy Eating Habits challengers sure did! I digress …)You might not appreciate the tiny improvement that came from that tiny change after one day. Or even after one week. One month?
“Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.” - James Clear
Your challenge is to stay with it. Because your change will come. And not just because I say so. Because day after day, your 1% change multiplies. So, at the end of a year of getting 1% better every day, you will be 37 times better! That’s huge growth! Do you like that math?! There is no tip or trick to it. The key is to just keep going. The habits accumulate. They compound and get you to where you want to be.
You have to get over the hump.
We, as humans, are naturally impatient creatures. But don’t be impatient with your transformation. If your focus is more on the time that it takes than the goal or the process, you’ll peter out. So, you have to get over the hump of frustration. Take a peek at the 1% Rule graph. Notice that at first, the 1% improvement line is horizontal? As time goes on, at first, you can’t appreciate any results. But then there’s an inflection point … and your growth takes off. It’s exponential!
Like Dori says in Finding Nemo, “just keep swimming.” I often get questions that start with “how long will it take … ?” How long will it take before I like drinking water? How long will it take for me stop missing my favorite candy bar? How long will it take before these habits feel natural? And there’s no good answer to that.
How long does it take to build a healthy habit? is a trick question. The most sincere but most frustrating answer is It will take as long as it takes … as long as you keep going. I can tell you you’ll get there. But I can’t tell you when. No one can. You may hear that it takes 21 days. Or 30 days. Or 66 days. And Malcolm Gladwell wrote about putting in 10,000 hours to master something. But I feel that none of these time periods is really correct. There’s no magic time period to make a habit. The magic is in the repetition. It’s in what you do everyday. Your consistency is magic. Not the calendar.
My goal is to coach my clients to have healthy habits for a lifetime.
So, be patient! For one, you never truly arrive. There’s always more. And I hope that doesn’t make you feel stressed or pressured. I hope that gives you hope! Because you can always grow. You can always get better. But also, as you reach your goals, you’ll never regret how long it took. Again, the focus is on the process, not the outcome. You are continually in a state of becoming. Take your time. Master healthy habits, one by one, and watch your self-confidence grow and carry you on.
“Confidence is a gateway to so much of what we want in life.” - Brendon Burchard
Small habits grow confidence. It’s just that simple. Small changes are simple to master. As I discussed above, mastering these small changes gives you the power to take on new changes. And that power is confidence. You’re basically saying to yourself I can figure this out. So, starting small is the most effective way to grow your self-confidence.
When you set out to achieve a goal, and you do … you learn to count on yourself. You can trust that you’ll do what you say you’ll do. And that self-trust allows you to move on to other goals. Self-confidence is the number one trait of high performers. You can reach for the biggest, the best, or the fastest, but understand that a massive life change doesn’t come from taking one massive step. Instead, your massive lifestyle shift will come from a series of small, consistent steps. That’s the tried-and-true way to create healthy habits that stick.
If you’d like to start building some healthy eating habits, with me as your guide, try my FREE 5-day Healthy Eating Habits Challenge. It starts September 9th and we’ll be making one, small but mighty habit every day to help you up-level your life. Click here to join me!
