If you’ve quit dieting, you’ve probably told yourself that it was too strict, too complicated, or too bland. That is probably true, but the flawed assumption underlying those thoughts is that you'll ever find "the right diet.” Let me just tell you: The next popular dieting book won't work any better than the previous ones, because it won’t focus on sustainability.
The best weight loss books will tell you—as creatively as possible and with just enough twists to make them seem “unique”—that processed foods make us sicker and fatter, while whole foods help create leaner, healthier bodies. Such a change in diet (n) is necessary for results, but, like with every other change, it's the strategy of implementation that makes or breaks weight loss plans. To succeed, we must gently reroute the habitual eating patterns that cause weight gain.
These Meta-Analyses Say It All
A meta-analysis is a “study of studies.” Meta-analyses are some of the most useful and reliable pieces of scientific data. It seems that any single study can validate or invalidate almost any point of view, and the data from different studies can be contradictory, but if something holds true over almost every study in that field, then there’s a very good chance it’s a correct and true observation.
There have been some meta-analyses done on weight loss diets. They looked at different diets to find the most effective one, but there was a problem that made the “best diet” question a moot point. Both analyses found that people don’t stick with their diets long-term.
One said, “Almost half of the studies included in our meta-analysis had completion rates less than 70%.”14 You might think that less than 70% isn’t too bad, but it is actually awful when you consider that these are short-term studies. People were being counted on to provide data and insight into a big problem. They had extra accountability and motivation to stick to their diet, they only had to do it for a limited time, and they still dropped out. If so many people are failing in that scenario, how much harder is it for the person trying to change on their own with little external motivation and support?
In a commentary on another meta-analysis done on 53 studies involving 68,128 adults, Dr. Kevin Hall concluded, “What seems to be clear is that long-term diet adherence is abysmal, irrespective of whether low-fat or other diets, such as low-carbohydrate diets, are prescribed.”15 Even when people correctly avoid yo-yoing their calorie intake, they can’t seem to consistently eat well on nutrition-based diets. They’re failing to change their behavior.
Why do we trust the framework that's been failing us for decades as obesity continues to march on unchallenged? We’ve got the wrong guy! The diet formulas are constantly blamed and pitted against one another. Low-carb camps say low-fat dieting doesn’t work, and low-fat camps say Paleo is ineffective, while Paleo screams at low-calorie diets as the problem. We’re blaming the ball for passing through a shredded racket. Let’s first get a racket that can hit things, and then maybe we can worry about the ball.
The failure of the weight loss industry is not the fault of diets (n), it's the fault of dieting (v). Many of these diets will work well if you stick to them, but you can't just “do whatever it takes” to stick to them. We need a smarter application strategy that infiltrates our underlying habitual and biological systems like a ninja. That’s where we run into another problem: Conventional habit formation advice is also ineffective (we’ll discuss why in chapter two), so even if it were properly integrated into weight loss solutions (it’s not), it wouldn’t work well.
Where Do We Go from Here?
Is the lesson here not to attempt to lose weight? If you’re going to be dieting, then yes, you’re better off not doing that. If you've tried one diet, you've basically tried them all. But Mini Habits for Weight Loss is not a dieting book, so the discouraging data on dieting doesn’t apply to it. There is very little research on the impact of small, consistent, lasting changes for weight loss, because it’s not dieting. I did find a couple of promising ones, though.
One small study followed three groups, and the group implementing small changes lost significantly more weight than the control group and the traditional dieting group, but the follow-up was only three months. Their changes were sustained at three months, but following up for a longer time would have been helpful.16
A little-known but enlightening study showed a linear relationship between consistency in diet and successful weight loss and maintenance.17 Researchers looked at the National Weight Control Registry of people with successful long-term weight loss and found that “participants who reported a consistent diet across the week were 1.5 times more likely to maintain their weight within 5 pounds over the subsequent year than participants who dieted more strictly on weekdays.”
Consistency is not only the key to behavior change: it is evidence of behavior change. Those trying to force themselves to eat a certain way will often slip up and have “cheat days,” when they eat what they want to eat. Those who succeed change their underlying food preferences through the power of habit formation.
It's time for a new approach. It's time for Mini Habits. We’re going to apply the world’s most effective change strategy to one of the world’s biggest problems. This is the marriage we’ve needed all along. It is a fundamentally different approach to weight loss, not in its recommendation of what foods to eat (though I will discuss it), but in its strategy for changing your dietary and movement habits.
Since this will almost certainly be the only book I write on weight loss, I have no incentive to trick you with short-term success. There are no plans to follow up this book with Xtreme Smoothie Fat Blasting Slim Belly Ripper Detox Cleanse 2.0: Become Completely Weightless in Just 14 Days! (unless I take up writing parodies). My incentive is to give you a timeless solution that lasts a lifetime and enables you to change your body and brain at a natural pace.
The Mini Habits Connection to Weight Loss
Successful weight loss requires a new set of habits. Your current and past habits have created your current weight. A different set of habits will create a different result (ideally, some rate of weight loss).
Mini habits will help you build a powerful new habitual base for healthy living. I’m not going to guarantee you won’t gain weight back once you change with mini habits, because no person is immune to gaining weight at any time. Closely tied to that, no person is beyond reverting back to old habits, because unhealthy food still tastes pretty good, even after you develop your healthy spinach addiction. Weight loss strategies are like fortresses: none is invincible to setbacks and problems, but the mini habits fortress is strong, reliable, and resilient.
The One Requirement for Lasting Change
Lasting change requires only one thing: consistent action over time. A mini habit is designed to fit this requirement exactly, no more and no less. This makes it the simplest, easiest, and overall ultimate vehicle for behavior change. To show you its power, these are my real life results with mini habits (as of writing, all of them are still in effect more than two years after starting).
I’ve had a consistent gym habit for more than two years and I’m in the best shape of my life.
I’ve written two international bestselling books and hundreds of blog posts. I’ve written a new blog post every week for two years straight without missing a week.
I read 12-20 books a year now, after typically reading only one per year.
That’s what I got, which is exceptional relative to my past, and this is the laughable way I got it.
Fitness mini habit: one push-up per day
Writing mini habit: 50 words per day
Reading mini habit: two pages per day
The most significant accomplishments of my life were achieved with three behaviors that require a cumulative time of less than five minutes to accomplish each day. These are mini habits. People have gotten even better results than I have with their mini habits, which doesn’t seem fair since I wrote the book. Kidding aside, I’m ecstatic to hear the success stories. Some people didn’t eve
n wait for this book to come out before figuring out how to use mini habits to lose weight. Bravo!
How is it possible for something so small to become so significant? Compounding.
The Sneaky Power of Compounding
Imagine you have a choice between getting the sum of one penny that’s doubled for 31 days or a lump sum of $5 million. Shockingly, you’d be crazy to take the $5 million, because in 31 days, your penny will have doubled its way to over $10 million. (Hat tip to Darren Hardy’s The Compound Effect for the example.) This intriguing fact reveals the problem and the solution for all of life.
The solution for life is to focus on compounding small choices in the direction desired. The problem is that we don’t see this solution, because we are easily impressed with the highly visible things like $5 million, and naturally less intrigued by the (counterintuitively) more powerful small and compoundable changes.
Think about this in terms of gaining a pound every month versus losing a pound every month. After one year, you’d weigh 12 pounds more or less. And the difference between these two scenarios is 24 pounds. That’s a significant difference for a small change in weight from one month to the next; our weight can fluctuate more than one pound in a single day!
One pound gained or lost only represents linear growth. Because of momentum, emotions, and accrued experience, forward progress is often exponential. It will compound. To put it into real terms, how do you think it would feel to be 12 pounds lighter than you are right now? How would it impact the way you feel about yourself? How do you think it would affect your energy levels? How do you think it would change your motivation and willingness to go further? Depending on which direction you go, just one pound gained or lost per month will put you well ahead or well behind, physically and psychologically, after one year.
Your food and exercise decisions can create a greater difference than one pound gained or lost per month. The fact that one pound per month is enough to create such a massive difference means that every meal decision matters. The smallest choices make the biggest difference.
Don’t misinterpret this. Aiming for one pound lost a month is not the suggestion here. For one, it’s too vague a focus. Compounded results are great, but they must start somewhere specific. If you double a penny every day for 31 days, you get more than $10 million. If you double nothing for 31 days, you get nothing. That little penny isn’t just important, it’s everything.
Permanent Improvement
If you succeed with Mini Habits for Weight Loss, it will become a matter of simply living out your new identity, which automatically and naturally produces a healthier version of you.
This internal change is more important than fat loss. Wise people recognize that who we are matters more than what we look like. Nobody escapes the detrimental effects of aging, so if all you care about is looking good, time is already going to ruin your plan. I’m not saying you shouldn’t pursue the healthy body of your dreams—do it—I’m just saying that the outside-in approach is destined for failure.
The person who loses weight by superficial ploys like diet pills, surgery, or starvation may feel excited at early results, but they won’t feel overwhelmed with joy about how they got those results, and they’ll feel terrible when they inevitably regain the weight. When you orchestrate a real and lasting improvement in your life, you’ll be surprised that the outer change actually takes a back seat to the joy of inner growth, which alters who we are. Inner growth affects our identity. You may not believe me now, but that will ultimately matter more to you than what the scale ever said.
We’ll discuss how change works in the next chapter. It’s important to establish our philosophy of behavior change before we even get to weight loss and how that works. It doesn’t matter what your plan is if you can’t change your behavior, so let’s nail that down first.
2
Brain Change before Body Change
Get Motivated? Get Out of Here!
“Habit is stronger than reason.”
~ Georga Santayana
How Change Doesn't Work
In this book, you won’t find…
Exclusive recipes
Calorie counting plans
“The One” Diet to Rule Them All
Demonization of carbs or fat as the single culprit of all obesity
The big “ah-ha!” factor of this book is one that other weight loss books lack: you’re going to get actionable strategies that mesh with your current lifestyle to help you achieve lasting change. I will cover the nutrition and weight impact of some foods, but if you firmly believe that a particular diet (n) is the best one for you, feel free to combine it with the strategies found in this book instead of “going on a diet.” (Ditch their suggested implementation plan and create a mini habit plan instead.) Beyond knowing the basic mechanisms behind weight gain and loss, losing weight comes down to whether or not you can permanently change your behavior.
Results in 30 Days or Less?
If you see “X pounds in X days” on a book, burn it immediately (or sneer at it if it’s digital). For the love of kale, please don’t ever aim for 7, 10, 21, or 30 days of change! The best use of a 30-day plan is if you have 30 days left to live. In the context of a life of about 28,000 days, 30 days’ worth of change is exactly as worthless as it looks.
I understand the theory that people will act differently for 30 days, and after that, they’ll have formed a habit or be motivated enough to keep the changes. But there is no scientific evidence that habits are formed in 30 or 21 days.18 A 2009 study found that participants took an average of 66 days to form a habit, with a wild range of 18 to 254 days.19 That tells us two things: the brain changes fairly slowly, but the exact speed at which it does for any given behavior is unpredictable. There’s a great chance a new behavior won’t be habitual by day 30.
Also, people like to make 30-day challenges difficult, since they only have to do it for a limited time. This makes habit formation even more unlikely. The above study found that the speed of habit formation is greatly influenced by the difficulty of the behavior. The brain will be much faster to adopt an easy habit of drinking one glass of water every morning (about 20 days according to the study) than to develop the challenging habit of practicing upside-down Kung Fu for two hours every day after dinner.
Legendary Chinese war general Sun Tzu once said, “Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win." Change is not about being able to fight yourself for 30 days; it’s about getting so strategic that you win before the fight begins. Applied to us, the key to losing weight is to change your brain before trying to change your body.
The Brain Change Process
If your body is the result of your brain state, how does the brain change?
Your subconscious brain is the boss, because it directly drives about half of your behavior and is constantly influencing your conscious decisions. People always try to fight against it, and they lose. Our strategy is to change it using its own nature, not cultural ideas like, “You just gotta want it more, bro!”
What is the true nature of the brain? The brain is a slow-changing machine, and that’s a good thing. If your brain could completely change overnight, you would be unstable. Let’s just say that your norm is to wake up, read the paper with coffee and a bagel, walk your dog, and watch the news. This is your habitual routine. Then one night, you get a phone call at 3 AM and have to run outside in your underwear to check on your neighbors. What if your brain latched on to this new routine and you continued to run outside at 3 AM every night in your underwear? Nobody would want that, so it’s a good thing our brains require more repetition than that! Let’s accept and be thankful for the stability our slow-changing brains provide us.
The ideal brain change process is so gradual that you may not notice it! This is a good thing. The more noticeable a change—such as when you switch from burgers and fries to “only green juice”—the more your brain is going to try to shu
t it down. (Just to clarify, it’s fine to juice vegetables as additional nutrition to a regular diet. There may even be health benefits in juice fasting for a day or two, but it is absolutely not a sustainable weight loss solution.)
Mini Habits for Weight Loss: Stop Dieting. Form New Habits. Change Your Lifestyle Without Suffering. Page 3