Adopt One Beneficial Habit!

We suspect we have all made new years resolutions through the years. We doubt many of us make them stick for long, probably not even beyond January. It's easy to be caught up in slogans like new year new me. But difficult to maintain.

This is much the same as the fad diet, celebrity diet or quick fix 28 day body change challenge. The promise of quick changes, that very rarely deliver over an extended period of time. So this year, maybe adopt one beneficial habit now - do not wait for the new year rush. Simply make one change now which will be beneficial over the long term and not just for 28 days.

There is never a perfect time to start, so,  now, here, today is as good as any. We don't have to be perfect in this endeavour, consistent - yes. Perfect? No.

Making assumptions here, but for most of us our detrimental habits might contain one or more of the following

-Excessive alcohol

-Excessive sugar

-Excessive food

-Sedentary lifestyle

-Little or no “exercise”

-Definitely no resistance training

-Too little sleep

-Reliance on cigarettes or nicotine alternatives

-Reliance on fast food

-Reliance on chocolate

-Reliance on caffeine 

-Reliance on energy drinks.

-No breakfast, no lunch, or limited lunch, massive evening meal to make up for missing the first two.

What did we miss?

Feel free to add anything else to that list. These are habits people have fallen into or adopted for any number of reasons. These cannot be “slayed” in 28 days, they will not be resolved by a diet. These habits are ingrained, and relied upon for us to live our lives in the manner in which we are accustomed too.

So what to do? Simply adopt one new beneficial habit.

For our clients it's simply to join us in our mobile gym for resistance training. This is the foundation of all that is beneficial for us. Depending on the clients and their goals we can often start off ignoring the detrimental habits listed above. We acknowledge them but make no attempt to slay them at the start of this process.

Simply introducing one new “thing” - resistance training in this case, can be more than enough to add to a clients weekly routine. Remember we all have family lives, work lives, social lives, and dare we say it - online lives, so we are busy enough.

Inviting a client to find one hour a week for the mobile gym to rock up and put them through their paces can be more than enough - in the beginning.

However what we do notice through the weeks is an adjustment to some of those less desirable habits. As clients learn about resistance training, often learning how to do it, and discussing the  benefits, they start to discuss those other habits, and how they might reduce or limit them. This is the actual starting point, where clients take ownership of this process, we do not badger them or hound them to change, they start coming to us to chat about those changes, yes its a slower process but it is long lasting.

So, from adopting one new habit, resistance training, we can now start to allow or encourage those detrimental habits to fade away over time. Change is hard, we are after all human, we can often cling to habits as a lifeline to stability in our lives, even if these habits are detrimental or misplaced.

Often these habits are socially engineered to be accepted or acceptable to a group, so if we lose these habits we lose this group, that can be a genuine threat to many. Hence we have to be gentle in adopting new beneficial habits, we never know whats going on behind the scenes. For us, number one is get the resistance training going, again it does not have to be perfect, just consistent, and don't go from zero to hero. If we get just one hour a week of resistance training then compared to 5, 10, 20 years with none, then that is an amazing achievement.

Beneficial habit No. 2: Rearrange your food day.

If we wish to be leaner then start to look to your food, don’t go on a diet, simply re organise your food day. As per previous blogs on how we view food, the chemistry of our food aligned with our chemistry as opposed to the antiquated calorie, we can organise our food in a much better fashion that will be less harmful to our waistline. If we understand that our body fat is a very clever chemical energy reserve then we can avoid adding to it by reorganising our food day.

Essentially we need to get to bed hungry, as its only this stimulus of hunger that triggers our bodies to use this chemical potential energy reserve to “keep us alive for the night”. We have to force our bodies to tap into this energy reserve. And of course its “easier” to be hungry when we are unconscious and asleep, as oppose to through the day when we are wide awake and can see and smell all those tempting snacks.

So take those sugars and carbohydrates out of that last meal of the day and re organise them into breakfast. Yes we can accurately call it breakfast as we are for the first time actually breaking our fast. Now enjoy a decent lunch for a change, as theoretically this would be your last complex carbs, simple carbs and fruit for the day. We are trying to encourage you to avoid those pastas, rices, breads, cereals, and potatoes at night, along with all the obvious sugars, less obvious fruits, and of course alcohol, although that may be a stretch at first.

Essentially we are looking run the last 16 hours of the day without those damaging sugars, and alcohols, and by avoiding those complex carbs and fruits, that although not damaging will prevent us using our body fat as the energy reserve it is through the night.

So enjoy that curry at night, without the rice, the bolognese without the pasta, the fish without the chips, etc…

We need to get to bed hungry, we will feel better for it in the morning, and will become incrementally leaner over time. If we can combine this with the resistance training then we can make huge gains in overcoming those detrimental habits, we will be leaner, hold our muscle mass, bone mass, and water mass whilst reducing our body fat levels. 

The resistance training allows our muscles to become as efficient as possible, the more efficient our muscles the more they can use our body fat as the energy reserve it is to help us be leaner, when used in conjunction with leaner evening meals with fewer or no carbs the more efficiently we can be leaner.

The obvious downfall of all diets is that they completely ignore resistance training, a for more powerful and long lasting benefit, than non descript exercise. As we diet we lose muscle, over our lives each diet depletes us of our muscle, the only part of our body that actually used body fat as the energy reserve it is, so across our lives we diminish our ability to use our body fat as we reduce our muscle mass.

Change a habit over time for long lasting results, not a knee jerk reaction.