Building Better Habits

Hopefully you now have some idea of our philosophy and approach.

This all comes down to habits, we are hoping that we can introduce beneficial new habits over time and allow older habits that might be deemed to be detrimental to slowly fade away.

So all we have to do is adopt one new beneficial habit, in this case lets just start with the food and avoid carbs as much as we possibly can at night.

Where we have traditionally had a larger meal at night that might include meat, or a meat substitute, some carbs, from pasta, rice, potato, bread or even cereal, along with veg, and some sauce, all we have to do is simply remove the carbs.

Enjoy all the flavours, keep the food as full of flavour as we can, just remove the complex carbs. Save them for breakfast or lunch the following day

We might go with fish without the chips. Bolognese without pasta, curry without rice, and so on.

That will start to make a difference.

Yes you will go to bed hungry, and you probably won't like me much, but we need to get to bed hungry, so that we can force our bodies to use our body fat as the energy store it is. This is where resistance training doubles this effect. The more efficient we make our muscles the more body fat they can use 24 hours a day as the chemical energy reserve it is.

That feeling of hunger is simply chemical signals being sent to our brain by our body, we need to understand that and then be able to reassure ourselves that we control our bodies and not our bodies controlling us.

We are all so over committed in life, we are so busy with work, family, friends, relaxing, sport, and even the washing too that introducing new habits can be tough.

Enforcing a complete change or overhaul is just about impossible, and where diets or institutions insist on change now, it is near impossible to maintain this huge change over extended periods. We can all manage these changes to our lifestyle over the short term, but eventually life, or pressure, or peer groups bring us back to our old ways.

Change is often complicated by our peer groups, friendship groups, or family groups, where going with the flow is far easier than stepping away from the accepted norms.

Even though we “know” something to be beneficial to us, changing to this new norm can be frowned upon or chastised by others stuck in some potentially detrimental habits with us. To step outside this can sometimes mean even being ostracised from certain groups.

This adds a whole level of challenge that can force us to abandon new beneficial habits, and stay with the group by going back to the old habits.

It is easy to overlook the stigma of going against the grain.

So this must be the right time for us to make these changes in order to have the fortitude to continue them even in the face of criticism from others in our groups. We need to be comfortable that this is for us, and for our benefit. 

In time we hope that we can take others with us on this journey,  but to focus on oneself is good enough and hard enough.

So keep the habit changes small and manageable, when we are at home this is where we can embrace avoiding sugars after lunch, and or avoiding carbs at night. 

If we get the chance, start learning about and putting into practice very simple resistance training routines, even once a week.

Most importantly once we start this there should be no such thing as a bad day or a bad night. 

Lets say we have been successfully avoiding carbs for a few days, then we find we have succumbed to them one night, that is not a bad night, that is simply a normal night from before we began this, it is what we always used to do. 

So do not chastise ourselves and self flagellate, simply view it as a normal night from the past, move on and have another go at a carb free night tonight.

There is no wagon, we do not fall off a wagon. This is simply about slowly and surely acquiring positive new habits that will help us be leaner infinitesimally every morning that we can avoid carbs the night before.

It's all in the habits - adding body fat infinitesimally is due to habits that we get comfortable with, and reducing body fat infinitesimally will also occur by slowly replacing those habits with new ones.

It simply takes time and an understanding that we need to win that argument with our bodies over what hunger means to us each night.