This is the framework of thinking behind the Mini Habits strategy. You’ll set easy, doable daily mini habits to form habits in high impact areas. Since we’re focused on weight loss and that entails many non-habitual choices too, you’ll also learn to make non-habitual healthy choices into some of the easiest, most casual choices you can make.
Nobody blames a sprinter for running in a straight line toward the finish line, because that’s the fastest and easiest way to cover the distance. Nobody scolds a basketball player for dunking the ball, when he could step back and try a more difficult fade away jumper. The easy path is always smarter, except when there are derivative consequences (like gaining weight) or when the hard path has derivative benefits worth pursuing (such as lifting weights to get stronger).
Sitting down all day is easier than standing, but it’s associated with mortality and metabolic slowdown. Eating fast food is easy, but it’s associated with inflammation and weight gain. Making success easier than failure isn’t insulting to one’s ego; it’s not a sign of weakness, and it’s not less impressive than “the hard way.” It’s just smarter.
How to Think About Weight Loss
These are a series of general mindsets for weight loss. Some are counterintuitive, and others are obvious. I’ll explain why each is effective. If you get these wrong, you lose. If you get these right, you win.
Your Primary Goal Is Not Weight Loss: It’s Behavior Change
When you want to lose weight, you shouldn’t focus on how you look or what the scale says. These things matter for measuring objective progress, of course, but they are not your measure of success, because they are not the primary thing you’re trying to change. This is akin to using a lever to move a heavy object. You can try to push the object directly, or you can use the lever’s power of leverage to make the move far easier.
Behavior change is the lever of weight loss. Therefore, the measure of success with weight loss is the same as any other attempt to change your behavior: To succeed with weight loss, you must change into the type of person who weighs less. If you do that, results will follow.
This means that if during your journey you haven’t lost weight but you’ve seen signs of behavioral change—whether it’s a growing preference for eating salad, less resistance to exercising, or an increasing sense of self control—you’re on your way to visible results. Behavior change always trumps weight change.
Do you think people would struggle if they could permanently, instantly, and visibly lose one pound of fat per hour spent on the treadmill? Of course not. To see that immediate cause and effect would be more than enough to motivate most people to lose all the weight they’d like to lose on a few marathon sessions.
Those who think they need results in order to motivate themselves to action have it exactly backwards. This viewpoint is why crash diets exist. Seeing 10 pounds lost in a week is supposed to trigger additional motivation to continue. This isn’t an inherently terrible idea, as results are indeed motivating and motivation is a good thing. It is, however, completely unsustainable weight loss, and you’re going to regain some or all of it back and take a motivation hit when you do, putting you in a worse position than when you started. The true formula to success is to take consistent action. Consistency creates habits, brings you results, and motivates you to continue. Results happen at the end of a process, not the beginning of it. As long as you maintain the process, you get the results. That’s why we’re going to master the process, which will continuously drive our results.
You’re in Charge
Previous attempts to lose weight probably positioned you as a lowly pawn on the battlefield. The diet guru has sent in your instructions, and if you want to lose weight, you will follow the diet. Regardless of the diet’s merit, this strips you of your sense of autonomy, and it makes it likely that you’ll rebel.
With mini habits, you’ll be designing your own battle plan. I’m giving you the information, materials, and ideas you need to succeed, but the style and exact plan of execution are completely up to you. You’ll have options of different strategies, all of which will put you in a position of power, where you can leverage your easy choices into habits over time (the key to victory) and immediate results now (the key to morale). I’ll tell you my favorite strategies and recommendations, but you know yourself and your life situation better than I do, so you will be making the final calls.
People can benefit from guidance, but they don’t need to be controlled. No person loses weight and keeps it off by giving up control over their choices. Eventually, they will make their own decisions. With mini habits, you’re in control from the start, so there’s no transition to make. You will not lose your sense of self-rule.
I’ll put it real-world terms: You will decide which days you overachieve with diet and exercise and which days you take a break and do the easy minimum. None of this takes away from your progress, because you’ll make that every day, even on bad days. This is completely adaptable to your life and your whims, which is why mini habits are the king of consistency and the most powerful change strategy in the world.
Don’t Be in A Rush
A study found that the best predictor of dropping out of weight loss treatment was high expectations for a lower BMI.123 The more weight they expected to lose, the more likely they were to lose their goal instead.
Every person’s mind and body are unique, and so the speed of weight loss is going to differ. Most weight loss books try to sell you on the speed of their method, taking advantage of people’s desperation to “finally lose the weight.” If a method doesn’t consider permanent behavior change, it will always put you back to where you started, minus the cost of the book and the opportunity to have made real change in that time.
CRITICAL: The End Goal Is Not the Strategy
This is one of the most important concepts to learn, not only for weight loss, but for any goal you wish to pursue. Many people, when they set a goal, make their strategy the same as their end goal. For example, a person who wants to stop drinking soda may make their strategy “stop drinking soda.” They assume it’s best because it’s the most obvious and visible strategy, but there are other strategies!
Every strategy you choose should be thoughtfully formed. If the best strategy for you happens to be the same as your end goal, then so be it. In my experience, the best strategy is rarely the most obvious one, because there are some counterintuitive aspects to behavior change. The futility of direct resistance is a great example of the obvious path being the inferior one.
To show you what I mean, here are eight (!) strategies you could use individually or in combination to stop drinking soda. The type of strategy is in parenthesis.
Stop drinking soda (direct resistance)
Limit soda consumption and pare down until eliminated (“weaning off”)
Stop buying soda (starve the source/change the environment. There are sub-strategies for how to go about this as well.)
Create a consequence for drinking soda (negative reinforcement)
Choose a comparably enjoyable replacement drink and make it readily available (substitution)
Delay drinking soda 10 minutes (establish control, reduce temptation, and wait out craving)
Create an alternate path and pair it with a reward (neural pathway detour combined with positive reinforcement)
Require yourself to drink a full glass of water before every soda (healthy obstacle and semi-substitute)
Isn’t that refreshing? There are at least eight approaches to stop drinking soda. You’re not trapped into trying and failing with the same one every time. In theory, any of them could work. In practice, some of them will work better, and some will depend on the person.
Since your strategy—not your desire—ultimately determines your success or failure, it’s worth spending time to think about it. I’ve done that with the strategies I’ll be recommending in this book, but don’t think that my ideas are definitely the perfect strategy for you.
Addition over Subtraction
One of the most difficult things about weight loss is the common feeling that you have to give everything up. You feel like you have to watch less TV. You feel like you have to cut out all of your favorite junk foods. It seems boring, dull, and difficult.
What if instead of trying to cut back on all of the snack foods you eat, you simply required yourself to eat more healthy food? The more healthy food you eat, the more comfortable you’ll be eating it. The problem isn’t so much that people eat unhealthy food; it’s that they are trained to do it. I eat unhealthy food on occasion, but my appetite for it is limited because I’ve practiced eating healthy food so much and now prefer it. I used to eat fast food almost every day, which only made me want to eat more of it. Every choice you make sets a precedent for the next time you’re in that situation.
Dieting is deprivation, so it’s a good thing we’re not dieting. Successful weight loss is more about adding new and better things to your life than taking things away.
Don’t Fear Food
When people diet, they “fear” certain foods that aren’t part of their diet, whether it’s bread or processed food or meat. They fear that they’ll be tempted and eat it. When you fear something, you’re admitting that it’s more powerful than you in some way. We don’t fear butterflies, because we know they can’t and won’t harm us.
Using fear as motivation seems powerful, but it puts you in a position of weakness. It also creates an all-or-nothing mindset. So, if you fear doughnuts (but really like them), you’ll avoid them for as long as possible until your willpower breaks and you go back to your doughnut-eating ways. The more you go through this process, the more you’ll reinforce the fear that you can’t resist tempting foods.
Fear’s all-or-nothing stakes damage your self-efficacy when things go poorly. Don’t fear eating doughnuts. Strategically and calmly devise ways to eat fewer of them (we’ll cover these in the Situational Strategies chapter). It’s much easier to quit something with strategy than with emotion.
Lean toward Delaying Pleasure
Tomorrow does not exist. Today is all we’ll ever have. We all know this, and it’s good to be reminded of it. But there’s an actionable takeaway here that’s easy to miss, and that’s to reverse your inclination. Instead of “I’ll have soda now and drink water tomorrow,” think “I’ll drink water now and have a soda tomorrow.” This is completely fine, even if you do drink a soda the next day.
It’s satisfying to invest in yourself, knowing you have a reward waiting for you later. The anticipation of a reward is sometimes better than the actual reward itself. By delaying pleasure, you increase the length and intensity of your anticipatory rewards. and you’ll end up doing the healthy thing more than planned. It works just as well for healthy food as it does for unhealthy food. Humans are good at procrastinating, and this is how to do it in a healthy way.
Delayed gratification is saying, “I know I can have this now, but I’m going to look forward to enjoying it later.” Overeating food (typically of the ultra-processed variety) front-loads all the rewards you can stomach now (literally). This is actually an inferior strategy for maximizing your pleasure, because of the law of marginal utility.
I first learned about the law of marginal utility in Economics class, and my professor explained it well with a simple example: “You’ll enjoy your first slice of pizza more than your second, and your second more than your fifth.” You’ve probably noticed this phenomenon, not only in your eating, but in all of life. If you truly want to maximize your food rewards, you’d be better off not pushing the limits of your fullness. When you eat food beyond fullness, the only reward you gain is the taste of the food. It can be unenjoyable or even painful to digest food when you’re already full. I could go into details like gas and bloating, but let’s just skip that part.
I’m asking you to eat smarter and enjoy your food in a different way, not suffer for weight loss. The same suggestion (don’t overeat) is often framed in such a way that makes you feel deprived for doing it, as if it’s a sacrifice you must make to lose weight.
Humans need rewards, and we will get them however we can. For lasting success, we must aim to live a rewarding lifestyle that results in weight loss. As you get better at delaying gratification, you will make more of the right decisions now and feel rewarded from that. Afterwards, additional gratification will come in the form of the pleasures you delayed and a healthier and more attractive body.
Don’t make this a hard rule: just attempt to lean toward delaying pleasure and doing the healthier thing today. There’s a fine line between direct resistance and leaning toward delayed gratification, but it’s absolutely critical to be on the right side of it. You’ll know which side of it you’re on, based on the amount of resistance you feel. If you feel a lot of resistance, it’s because you’re resisting too hard. Relax. Lower the stakes.
Present-Day Thinking
One of the most difficult aspects of weight loss is the weight of the past. If you’ve been overweight for a while, you may feel ashamed about your lifestyle or your weight. I invite you to drop that burden. You don’t deserve it or need it. It doesn’t benefit you, and it’s actually illogical to let it influence you.
Consider that this moment forward is unwritten, and therefore it is objectively neutral. You can live any number of different ways from here, which is why dwelling on the past isn’t merely a waste of time, but also a hindrance to forward progress.
Mutual funds will often give the disclaimer that “past results do not guarantee future performance.” The same is true for our lives, whether we’ve had excellent or poor results in the past. For those who have a past full of regrets and poor choices, this is freedom. For those who have been doing well, it’s a reminder to keep going. You can’t change the past, so don’t worry about it.
You’re Training
One of the biggest mistakes that nearly every person makes when trying to lose weight is in the perspective of what they’re doing. If you’re going to try mini habits for weight loss, you’ll do things differently, and you’re going to love the change! Why?
You’re not being punished. You’re not “making sacrifices” to lose weight.
Those are losing perspectives. What do top athletes do? Train. What do top writers do? Write. What does anyone successful do to get where they are? Practice their craft until they succeed.
Just like some people are born with athletic genes and some people learn to golf at an early age, some of us are genetically given slenderness (regardless of lifestyle) or have learned to manage our weight. Many others have been put in the “Western Lifestyle Program,” a weight-gaining system that works extremely well. You are going to retrain your brain and body to be healthier and lighter.
If you don’t like your current weight, but you like your current lifestyle, you’ve got a choice to make, because your lifestyle IS your weight. Lifestyle and weight are white on rice and cold on ice. They’re permanently bonded and inseparable. Lifestyle isn’t all-or-nothing, though. Just because you’ve changed to generally eat well and stay active doesn’t mean you can’t also eat chocolate truffles, drink socially, or binge-watch a TV series. Anyone who tells you these things are “forbidden for weight loss” is wrong on multiple levels.
The healthy lifestyle is extremely enjoyable, and I’m not talking about the health or weight benefits. To show you what I mean, here is an example of a positive chain of a healthy lifestyle: better nutrition leads to better sleep, which leads to fewer cravings, which leads to better eating habits, all of which lead to more energy, which leads to a more active lifestyle, which leads to improved physical and mental performance, which leads to more confidence and success, which leads to more money, which leads to a Ferrari. Better nutrition leads to a Ferrari? That’s unlikely. Even so, the chain effect of healthy living is powerful in surprising ways. You may not get a Ferrari from eating blueberries, but you will notice some unexpected tangential changes when living healthier.
Athletes have some of the strictest diets and training programs, and many of them enjoy every minute of it. People get addicted to going to the gym. People lust for salads. This is not impossible for anyone, it’s just foreign to most.
Choose Boundaries over Rules, Identity over Slavery, and “Don’t” over “Can’t”
What’s the first thing a person thinks when they try to lose weight?
Mini Habits for Weight Loss: Stop Dieting. Form New Habits. Change Your Lifestyle Without Suffering. Page 12