2. The primary benefit of exercising is not to get a fat loss result. Fat loss is a side effect of living healthier. The whole reason fat loss makes us look more attractive is because being healthy is attractive. But the benefits of being healthy far exceed attractiveness and weight. If you are eye-locked on the scale and on your stomach in the mirror, you may feel discouraged early on when results aren’t there yet. It takes time for your body to show change. If you put in the work consistently, results will follow. We’re going to go about this in in a smart, mini-habit way to keep you on track regardless of your motivation, but remember this if you’re having doubts.
3. High-intensity training requires recovery time. Be careful not to overdo high-intensity training, because an injury will set you back; more is not necessarily better.
4. You’re not supposed to do high-intensity training every day (unless you’re already an elite athlete). You know now from the studies that it doesn’t require a lot of time exercising to make a difference. And here’s the good news, depending on how you look at it: the more overweight you are, the more results you’ll see from exercising.
5. High-intensity exercise keeps your body working, even after you stop. If the results of HIIT were limited to time spent exercising, it would be shown to be inferior to moderate-intensity exercise in studies. Instead, it’s shown to be far superior, and that’s because of the effect it has after you stop.
One workout I’ve been doing in my apartment building is interval training in the stairwell. (Very few people use the stairs in my building. Everyone takes the elevator. I digress.) Starting at the bottom, I sprint up the stairs as fast as I can. Then I’ll “actively rest” by going back down the stairs at a pace that lets me catch my breath. Pro tip: I play the Rocky Balboa theme song on my phone, and put it at the top of the stairs, so as the difficulty increases toward the top and I’m feeling fatigued, the music gets louder to cheer me on!
One day after I had finished interval training session on the stairs, I continued to actively sweat for 10 minutes. Even after I took a shower, I continued to sweat. My body was still working. A study found this “afterburner” effect for fat oxidation: “Although more lipid was used during exercise in the low-intensity trial, more lipid was used after the high-intensity exercise.”159
To conclude, when you exercise for fat loss, don’t aim for time, aim for intensity. You can easily make up your own HIIT program. The basic idea is to go all out in an exercise for 15-60 seconds with a period of rest of 1-5 minutes.
If you want to use the treadmill, most of them have an interval setting. When I use the treadmill or exercise bike, I tend to adjust the speed manually. One good idea for an entertaining interval session is to watch a TV show or game (if your gym has a TV) and, whenever a commercial comes on, go all-out for its duration. Commercials take up roughly five to seven minutes total out of a 30-minute show, which is a nice interval split. When your show comes back on, you’ll be rewarded with rest and entertainment at once! It’s a nice little system that I’ve enjoyed. My friend and I have also done “curl challenges” during commercials, in which we curl a relatively light weight for the full duration of the commercial break.
The internet has plenty of other ideas for high-intensity training. Search for “HIIT workouts” or “interval training,” and make it fun! You’ll see interval training as a mini habit option in the next section.
Walking
Walking is very good. If you look at the human body, it’s easy to see that we’re meant to walk. In the past, walking was necessary to get around. We’ve since invented our way out of having to walk very much, but walking is too good for us to quit doing.
If you want to start out with something effective and not intimidating, walking is a proven winner. Whereas most exercise is known to increase appetite, one study found that the energy deficit induced by walking did not result in increased appetite: “This study demonstrates that, despite inducing a moderate energy deficit, an acute bout of subjectively paced brisk walking does not elicit compensatory responses in acylated ghrelin, appetite, or energy intake. This finding lends support for a role of brisk walking in weight management.”160
The National Weight Control Registry says that, among people who have achieved lasting weight loss, walking is the most commonly reported form of exercise.161 Anecdotally, I’ve found that lots of walking makes my stomach trimmer, more so than resistance exercise. I highly recommend making walking your “base” activity, and then doing HIIT as a bonus. You can combine them into one by aiming to walk a certain amount and then doing the occasional run/sprint. I’m aware of how unstructured that sounds, but structured routines are for people who already have strong exercise habits.
If you are still in the stages of fighting yourself to exercise, a structured “full workout” plan will be a great struggle to do consistently. Consider unstructured plans like “walk to the end of the driveway, optionally continue walking, and optionally do interval sprints during the walk.” The difficulty is adaptable to you, meaning that you have very little reason to say no to it, even on your “off” days.
Resistance Training
Resistance training is the best way to increase lean muscle mass. This is highly beneficial for a number of reasons, but it has not been studied very much in regards to weight loss. Theories abound about how more muscle mass increases metabolism, but one study found that aerobic training was superior for weight loss, because resistance training did not result in fat loss (it did result in lean muscle mass gains).162 Starting out, I recommend focusing on walking and aerobic (HIIT) exercise. Those are going to give you the greatest initial return on time and energy invested.
That said, resistance training is more useful than aerobic exercise for daily living. It can improve your posture and your performance in anything active, and it can even reduce pain caused by weakness or help you recover from injury (physical therapy). Don’t rule it out completely! It’s fun to see yourself get stronger with weight progression. If you learn to enjoy exercise, you’ll love resistance training.
Fitness Mini Habits
If you’ve never been able to exercise consistently, you’ve got to try having an exercise mini habit. These are just some of the fitness mini habits you could create. There are certainly more! Most of these mini habits take seconds, not minutes or hours. The busiest person on Earth has time for this. The laziest person on Earth has enough energy for this. Mini habits make exercise unintimidating, fun, and always doable (the opposite of nearly every exercise program). Here’s the list of fitness mini habits.
One push-up
One pull-up
One sit-up
10 jumping jacks
Run in place for 30 seconds
Run on a treadmill for 30 seconds
Dance for one song
Run up and down a flight of stairs one time
Walk beyond the end of your driveway or mailbox
Put on your gym clothes (seriously)
Put on your gym clothes and do one push-up (or other exercise)
“Show up” at the gym without specific exercise plans (please try it before you discount it)
One intense exercise interval lasting 30 seconds (sprinting, stairs, running in place as fast as you can, etc. Since you can do this running in place, you can do it anywhere!). Alternatively, you can do moderate-intensity exercise for 30 seconds.
Press play on a workout video (or aim to complete 30 seconds of a workout video)
Stand up to work once every two hours (if you have a stand-up desk), or get up for a few seconds every hour to wake up your metabolism if you only have a sitting desk. I find with stand-up desks, it’s often better not to aim for a set amount of time, but to “just stand up for a moment.” Then I turn the music on, groovin’ as I work. Simply choosing to stand is enough to start the process. As with any mini habit, you may sit back down immediately after meeting your easy requirement. Never fear doing too little. Fear doing nothing.
Fitness
Bonus: Do more of the same exercise or more of a different exercise.
You may notice some variations, like putting on gym clothes vs. putting on gym clothes AND doing an exercise mini habit vs. showing up at the gym. For some, doing an exercise when they aren’t in workout clothes is futile for bonus reps, because they don’t want to exercise in business clothes. That’s why there’s a “put on gym clothes” mini habit, which may be enough to start the exercise process. Others may need to begin exercising in order to get the process started, but also need to be in workout gear, so, for them, the ideal mini habit is going to be something like “put on gym clothes and do one push-up.” Yet others will do well with just a “one pull-up” type of mini habit. I started with one push-up per day, and now I aim to “just show up” at the gym, which has worked really well.
Offbeat Mini Habit (not related to exercise or food)
Meditate for one minute: Meditation is one of the best indirect practices for weight loss, because it improves many relevant areas. It can decrease cortisol levels, improve your willpower, increase your mindfulness and focusing ability, and help you sleep better. Each of these has been shown to help with weight management. Meditating for just one minute can make a difference. Try it! Search for “one minute meditation” on YouTube for a guided meditation session.
Bonus: Meditate another minute or seven.
8
Mini Habit Plans
Everyone Laughs until They Experience the Results
“Do the difficult things while they are easy and do the great things while they are small. A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.”
~ Lao Tzu
Mini Habit Cues
Now we will bring it all together into a strategy that fits your lifestyle like a glove. Here’s a recap of the mini habit ideas we’ve covered so far. Choose a maximum of four you’d like to integrate into your life.
Food Mini Habits
Eat one (extra) serving of fruit
Eat one (extra) serving of vegetables
Make one mini healthy food upgrade
Prepare one healthy meal at home
Drink one glass of water
Chew each bite 30+ times
Fitness Mini Habits
One push-up
One pull-up
One sit-up
10 jumping jacks
Run in place for one minute
Run on a treadmill for one minute
Dance for one song
Run up and down a flight of stairs one time
Walk beyond the end of your driveway or mailbox
Put on your gym clothes (seriously)
Put on your gym clothes and do one push-up (or other exercise)
“Show up” at the gym without specific exercise plans (please try it before you discount it)
One intense exercise interval lasting 30 seconds (sprinting, stairs, running in place as fast as you can, etc. Since you can do this running in place, you can do it anywhere!). Alternatively, you can do moderate intensity exercise for 30 seconds.
Press play on a workout video (or aim to complete 30 seconds of a workout video)
Stand up for a small amount of time while working (stand-up desk) or get up for a few seconds every hour to wake up your metabolism. I find with stand-up desks, it’s often better not to aim for a set amount of time, but to “just stand up for a moment to work.” Then I turn the music on, groovin’ as I work.
Offbeat Mini Habit
Meditate for one minute
Visit minihabits.com for more mini habit ideas.
In the first Mini Habits book, I covered the basic strategy of using small daily practices to create mini-sized habits and change your behavior. Once you commit to a mini habit, it’s important to define your cue.
Mini Habit Cues
A habit cue is whatever triggers you to perform the behavior. For example, a person wanting to develop a guitar practicing habit might say, “I will practice playing guitar every day at 7:30 PM.” The cue is 7:30 PM.
I have good news. Weight loss is challenging, but when it comes to forming good eating habits, you have a significant advantage over other behaviors. Meals themselves are cues. For example, one push-up can be done at 6 PM (time cue), before a shower (activity cue), or any time during the day (flexible daily, no specific cue). A meal, however, is going to happen whenever it happens, and your mini habit will be in play whenever it does (i.e., a meal-based mini habit’s cue is the meal itself).
Therefore, every meal-based mini habit will have an activity-based cue. The one exception is if you decide to use the flexible daily cue for all of your mini habits. In that case, you’d complete your mini habits at any time during the day, even between meals.
My mini habits have always been the flexible “do it any time before you go to sleep” type, because I am literally the least schedule-driven person I know. I rarely make plans. I’m not “busy.” Almost every day is freestyle for me, and as long as I get the right things done, I’m happy. This lifestyle choice allows me to do things like travel at a moment’s notice. To me, not having things on the schedule is freedom (one of humanity’s longstanding core desires).
Here’s why I bring that up: Most self-help advice ignores people like me, or else they suggest that I should transform myself into a “type A” person. I see the advantages of living that way, but there are also advantages to my way and other ways of living. Poor strategies force you to adapt to them (e.g., dieting); smart strategies adapt themselves to where you are right now. This book has a smart strategy flexible enough to fit the lifestyle of all types of people (A, B, C, R, and Alien).
There are three cues to choose from: activity-based, time-based, and the flexible “any time before bed” option. If you’re schedule-driven, you’ll do well with the time- or activity-based cues. If you live a spontaneous and non-scheduled lifestyle, you’ll love the flexible daily cue. That said, there are no hard rules about who can succeed with what cue. Maybe schedule-driven people would enjoy the opportunity to find a time between activities to squeeze in a mini workout. Maybe spontaneous people would enjoy a bit more structure in their lives with scheduled mini habits. All of these cues can work, but make sure you choose one for each mini habit (except meals, which we’ll cover next).
Activity-Based Cue: These actions are cued by activities you know you’ll be doing each day. Example of four activity-based mini habits: Eat one serving of fruit once you arrive at work, eat one serving of vegetables during your first work break, drink one glass of water when you get home from work, and chew each bite 30 times during your daily work snack. (A clever activity cue for exercise is to do at least one push-up or alternative exercise action after you use the restroom. That is more than once per day, but that’s still doable for some people.)
Time-Based Cue: Time-based actions can work well if you have a tightly scheduled lifestyle in which every moment is planned for. Example of three time-based mini habits: Eat one healthy snack at 3:15 PM, drink one glass of water at 6 PM, and eat a bowl of fruit at 7 PM.
Flexible Daily Option (No Cue): These actions can be done whenever, as long as you do them before the day ends. They’re flexible, but they require a bit more mindfulness, as you have to choose when to do them each day rather than rely on a preset cue. Example of four flexible mini habits: Eat one serving of fruit any time before bed, eat one serving of vegetables before bed, chew each bite 30 times at any meal during the day, and drink one glass of water before bed.
Traditionally, only time-based and activity-based cues are possible for forming habits, but a mini habit is so small and easy to do that it doesn’t need a specific cue. We don’t need cues for bad habits, do we? We just tend to do them at various times because they’re easy and rewarding. A mini habit has the same sort of appeal, only it’s a good habit.
A smoker may smoke when eating, drinking, and/or stressed out. That’s multiple cues for one behavior. In the same way, you’ll develop some triggers for a flexible daily mini hab
it, but won’t rely on any one cue. There are still triggers involved, but you’ll let them grow “in the wild.”
The advantage of this is diversified strength. Think of a cue as an individual root. You can develop one very strong root for a habit, or you can build a number of weaker roots. Multiple-root habits have individually weaker roots, but together, they may be more resilient than a one-root habit. This is precisely why bad habits are difficult to break—because it’s not as if you can just single out the one trigger for the bad behavior and avoid it. The triggers are numerous, and some of them are even internally triggered by certain feelings (unavoidable).
Mini Habits for Weight Loss: Stop Dieting. Form New Habits. Change Your Lifestyle Without Suffering. Page 19