Vegetable Bonus: Eat additional vegetables or go all in with a mega salad!
Make one mini healthy food upgrade: This is a vague mini habit, but in practice, that can be a good thing. Make one small healthy upgrade per day or at mealtime (depending on your plan and cue). Maybe you’re at a restaurant and you swap your typical side of fries for a baked potato, green beans, or a salad. Upgrade! Maybe you’re at home ready to snack it up, and you think to eat chips, but decide to eat some unsalted raw nuts first. Upgrade! Maybe you go for the Cobb salad over lasagna, and you ask the waiter for olive oil and vinegar instead of the usual soybean oil dressing variants. Double upgrade! Every day is full of food decisions, and you don’t need to overhaul them all at once (nor should you try). This strategy cements that correct perspective in your mind by asking you to make one small upgrade of your choosing.
Here’s the opposite of an upgrade: skipping meals and not eating when you’re hungry. The next time you think to make yourself hungry as a way to lose weight, read the introduction of this book again. It will remind you that artificially restricting calories is a weight-gaining move. If it’s 11 PM and you’re usually hungry at this time, but aren’t feeling hungry on a particular day, then no, you don’t need to eat. Listen to your body. Eat when you’re hungry, don’t when you’re not, and use mini habits to shift how you eat.
Food Upgrade Bonus: Double or triple your upgrade. There’s no upper limit!
Prepare one healthy meal at home: This mini habit is completely dependent on your current situation and habits. Some people always cook at least one meal per day, while others eat out all the time. I suggest breakfast, because it’s very easy to make a healthy breakfast. (Eggs are great for weight loss because they are nutritious and make you feel full.136 Fruit and yogurt are a fine option as well. Add cinnamon!) For many people, this mini habit will be too big to start out with. It depends on your current habits. If you can’t do it every day, don’t try to do it every day. Either choose a different mini habit or aim for five days per week or something like that. Daily mini habits are best for a few reasons (consistency, daily mindfulness, time to habit, etc.), but again, it’s important to make this work for your lifestyle.
Don’t cheat yourself: Most microwave meals aren’t healthy. Cereal and grilled cheese are not weight loss weapons. White pasta and marinara sauce is a weight-gainer (whole wheat pasta and olive oil, though, is a decent choice).
Healthy Meal Upgrade: Prepare another meal, or make enough for healthy leftovers!
Drink one glass of water: Water is a weight loss WEAPON for the reasons we covered earlier. You might think it’s a bad idea to aim for one glass of water per day, because we’re supposed to drink more than that. But pay attention to that thought, because that’s exactly the type of thought we want to be having! Now you’re mindful of how much water you’re drinking per day, and thinking “I can do more than one per day,” instead of feeling overwhelmed by “having to drink 8 glasses per day.” Drinking one glass won’t ever prevent you from drinking another; it will only make you more likely to do so. Remember, the strategy is not the same as the end goal.
Too boring? I like the taste of plain water, but some people like some zing in their drink, and that’s okay. Nature has multiple answers. If you are accustomed to flavored beverages, you can make your transition away from “the dark side” easier by spicing your water up with fruits, spices, and carbonation. Lemons, limes, mint, apples, cinnamon, mango, ginger, cucumber, strawberries, oranges, and basically any other fruit (especially citrus) can liven up your water in a healthy way. Lemon is one of the most popular healthy water additives for good reason. It’s tasty, it’s packed with flavonoids and antioxidants (like Vitamin C), and it won’t take much of it to add flavor.
If this is really important to you (if you drink a lot of sodas, lattes, and the like, then flavoring your water could be crucial to your success), you can buy a water infuser pitcher and you’ll have delicious tasting water ready all day long. You’ll find plenty of infuser options on Amazon. Even if you don’t buy from Amazon, it’s a great place to see reviews. Just throw your fruits, vegetables, and spices into the infuser with some water and put it in the fridge. Don’t forget the cinnamon! Please, never forget cinnamon. (If you have some cinnamon nearby, go over there and smell it. It’s my favorite smell. My family had a cat named Cinnamon, and, as a kid, I used to sing to her. She’d flatten her ears out of love.)
Like most unhealthy foods and drinks, soda’s main advantage is availability. If you infused water with your favorite fruits and spices and always had that available, I bet you could easily move on from cheap syrupy soda. Soda tastes great, but why drink it when you can get delicious beverages without the downsides?
Perhaps you don’t want to go through the trouble of infusing your water with fruits and spices when there are so many ready-made drinks out there. I understand. A very easy and effective alternative is to buy 100% fruit juice, but instead of drinking it straight, add just a little bit of it to a full glass of water to flavor it. You’ll be surprised how refreshing this is, and you won’t be getting an overdose of fructose from drinking 100% fruit juice.
All fruit juices (even 100% fruit juice) are weight-gaining beverages in anything but small quantities. Fruits are one of the best foods for weight loss in their whole form, but they becomes weight-gaining as juices. Just add enough to flavor your water to satisfaction.
Avoid packets of powder for flavor. They all contain sweeteners. I’ve never seen a good one. They can be a decent exercise drink, but not for general drinking.
Water Bonus: Two, three, four glasses of water? Oh, you’re good.
Chew each bite 30+ times: This is per bite, not per mouthful. This practice has multiple benefits: You’ll digest your food easily. You’ll taste and enjoy your meal more. You’ll automatically eat more mindfully. You’ll be nearly guaranteed to eat less because your “I’m full” response will have enough time to register. Set a “chew count” per bite and practice it. Eventually, it will become habitual, just as your current chewing count is habitual.
I’ve tested out the 30 chews per bite mini habit and it’s great. Digestion is much better, the food is more enjoyable, and it’s tougher to overeat. I did find some issues with the flat 30 chews per bite rule. In practice, I would adjust to 15+ bites for softer foods like fruit and 45+ for tougher foods like meat, and I think that’s a good general guideline to follow.
Chewing your food well reduces food consumption for the same satiety and greater satisfaction. That’s a huge, irreplaceable win. A Chinese study found that men of all weights ate about 12% fewer calories when they chewed their food more. Scientifically speaking, they found more chewing resulted in decreased ghrelin levels (the hunger hormone). When left to their natural chewing preferences, the obese men ate more quickly and chewed fewer times. How many more chews did it take to decrease calorie consumption by 12%? 25 more. They started with about 15 chews, and were then instructed to chew 40 times, which resulted in the change.137 In my testing, I found 40 chews to be a bit excessive, and, if it’s a chore to do it, you probably won’t. I find that it works best to require less and encourage bonus chews. That said, if you want to and can chew 40 times, go for it. You can’t overchew food; you can only underchew it.
Chewing Bonus: On any bite, go for more chews. Can you do 50? At higher chew counts, it becomes surprisingly difficult to not swallow your food.
7
Fitness Strategy
Let’s Make it Fun
“Fitness needs to be perceived as fun and games or we subconsciously avoid it.”
~ Alan Thicke
Mindset
Many overweight people associate exercise with strenuous activity, severe discomfort, and even pain. They think they have to “punish” themselves and their body in order to get the significant fat loss they want. Extreme workouts can definitely bring results, but if the experience worsens your relationship with exercise, those results won’t last.<
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A study found that those who had internalized the stigma of being overweight had lower self-esteem and avoided exercise.138 This seems paradoxical if you think in terms of simple cause and effect. If a person wants to lose weight, and exercise helps weight loss, why would they avoid exercise? Because they find it uncomfortable. Because they’re overwhelmed by society’s pressure to be thin. Because they think they have to climb 15 mountains before exercise will “show a benefit.” Because they focus on the stigma of being overweight. In summary, it’s because they have the wrong perspective and the wrong relationship with exercise, which makes them not even want to think about it, let alone do it.
What’s more valuable: losing 15 pounds in one month from strenuous exercise you hate or losing no weight in a month but enjoying exercise more than when you started? I hope you said the latter, because it is roughly 198 times superior than any exercise program ever devised. You may question it, because 15 pounds is a good amount of weight, but the return from a healthier relationship with exercise—and the knowledge of how to improve it further—will continue to pay off for the rest of your life. Choosing the 15 pounds in one month would be like taking a one-time payment of $200 now instead of receiving $100 a week for the rest of your life.
Imagine the following. What if you enjoyed exercise? What if you smiled when you thought of it? What if you did it because you wanted to do it, not because you wanted a result from it or felt pressured or shamed into it? This concept is foreign to many people, because exercise is portrayed everywhere as “the way to a flatter stomach” and “the fast track to burning calories and losing weight.” If that’s all exercise is to you now, you’re going to be very excited to find it’s much more than that.
In keeping with our theme, we’re going to focus on our long-term relationship with exercise, rather than on using it to get a short-term result. I’ve done this to transform multiple areas of my life with mini habits. One of those areas was reading. There was a time when reading was a chore I only did when I wanted a specific result from it. Reading to me was like exercise to most people trying to lose weight. Here’s the story.
How I Repaired My Relationship with Reading
When I was younger, I enjoyed reading books, especially the Goosebumps and Choose Your Own Adventure series. Then school happened. Some youth rebel with sex, drugs, and alcohol. I rebelled against homework. Aren’t I wild? I know most kids don’t like homework, but I despised it. I had to spend eight hours a day at school five days a week, and then they tried to take even more of my freedom by giving me busywork at home! No way!
A big portion of my homework was assigned reading. The more I was forced to read for school, the more I resisted. I was rebellious, sure, but this evolved beyond mere rebellion. My relationship with reading had changed. It was no longer a fascinating adventure into a fictional world or an enlightening nonfiction discovery, it became a dull “do it or suffer the consequences” activity. In my own time, I stopped reading for fun.
In college, I was excited to see a British Literature class available in which we would read and discuss books by two of my favorite authors, J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. I didn’t read a single assigned book that semester.
My subconscious wanted freedom, but from what? Reading was not actually the enemy; it just seemed like it, because it was the tool used to take my freedom away. I only wanted my freedom back. Does that sound familiar to your experience with exercise? If you regularly feel overwhelming pressure to exercise, then you have a broken relationship with it. Society and weight loss books and programs tend to turn exercise from “just moving and using your body” into a resentment-ridden job.
My third ever mini habit was to read two pages in a book per day. It was easy, lightweight, and changed my relationship with reading over time. I read roughly one book a month these days. It’s nothing amazing, I know, but it is relatively amazing considering I used to read, at most, one book per year. I’ve even read thousands of studies researching for my books, because I can do it on my terms. I can do it from a place of freedom.
Within that story is precisely the difference between this book and every other “dieting” book you’ve read. I’m not prescribing you an exercise routine to “torch” calories or “shred your abs.” I’m asking you to work on your relationship with exercise (and food, too), because, if you can change that, you will drive your own results for life. Self-generated results sure beat a 30-day program that leaves you wondering what to do on day 31.
As you read through the suggested types of exercise for weight loss later in this chapter, keep in mind that exercise type is less important than repairing the damage done by seeing it as a job, as punishment for being overweight, or whatever other kind of dysfunctional relationship you may have formed with it.
What is to dislike about exercise, after all? We move every day, and that is exercise. If you dislike exercise, it’s probably the same situation as me and reading, and the solution is to get to know it again without all the baggage.
After exercising in the past, have you noticed that you feel better about yourself? Exercise is intrinsically and biologically rewarding on multiple levels. Other than improving basically every known health marker, it helps you sleep better, improves your sex life, improves your ability to focus, boosts your baseline energy level, feels good (as endorphins are released), chemically improves your mood, and is equal to medication in the treatment of depression and anxiety.139 As some have said before, if exercise were a pill, it would be a blockbuster drug with record-breaking sales.
A long list of exercise benefits is irrelevant if you can’t get yourself to do it. Before my one push-up per day mini habit, I failed to go to the gym consistently for 10 years, so I completely understand the frustration of wanting the benefits but not feeling up to the task. Understand that a lack of motivation to exercise is determined by your subconscious mind, and you can change it with an exercise mini habit.
This is critical: the end result is ultimately determined by the goal, but it is not dependent on the goal. The goal matters, but not in the way people think it does. In the push-up story, you might recall that when I aimed for 30 minutes (goal), I got nothing (result). But when I aimed for one push-up (goal), I got 30 minutes (result). The goal and result are nearly opposites, showing the counterintuitive nature of behavior change. The explanation, however, is simple—failure demoralizes us and success motivates us.
If you set a small goal and meet it, you’ve already succeeded on a small level. You can stack these small wins indefinitely, and you’ll end up with a bucket of small wins adding up to a huge win. But if you get greedy, aim for the big win right away, and fail for whatever reason, you’ll feel discouraged. In many cases, the initial failure is motivation, which we cannot fully control. It continuously baffles me that this boneheaded strategy is the mainstream way that we’re taught to pursue goals. I believe we get “dream big” confused with the strategies needed to reach those dreams. If you want to succeed at something, dream big and take small actions repeatedly (not “dream big” and “take massive action”).
A mini habit is a unique challenge in that it’s fun(ny). You’re going to be thinking, “I can’t believe I’m aiming for one push-up a day,” or “Walk to the end of my driveway? Am I seriously doing this? I hope my neighbors don’t ask me what I’m doing out here.” Laughing at your exercise goals is quite a change from the traditional daunting approach.
In addition to your exercise mini habit, you will be encouraged to do “bonus reps,” but that’s completely up to you. If you do extra, you’ll be doing it because you want to do it (autonomy), not because of some arbitrary, controlling rule. The small size of the mini habit means you won’t feel controlled by it, and the flexibility for bonus reps will supercharge your sense of autonomy because it’s choice-driven instead of goal-driven. You can use whatever momentum, motivation, or willpower you have at your disposal to do additional exercise.
On the days you need a bre
ak, you can do your mini habit and walk away with a win. Even the minimum mini habit is a win if done daily because it is enough to change your subconscious feelings about exercise. Not only are you practicing frequent exercise, but you’re also practicing the small step habit, or the idea that even a small step forward is useful. This will gradually replace any residual beliefs you may have about exercise being miserable and only useful in large amounts. I hope this makes sense in text form, because in practice it will blow your mind (in time, since we are talking about brain change).
Mini Habits for Weight Loss: Stop Dieting. Form New Habits. Change Your Lifestyle Without Suffering. Page 17