Did you ever hear the saying that once you can ride a bicycle you’ll never forget how to do it? Even if you would not use it for 20 years and then one day decide that you want to take the bicycle instead of the car, you would still do it the right way without having to think about.
The interesting thing is that it takes a very short time to form a new habit we find pleasurable. On the other hand it can take between 30 and to 254 days to form a new habit that is not so convenient (Study by University College of London performed on 96 people). Of course, more complex behaviors like playing the piano require more time to become a habit. Less complex habits like pealing an apple in a certain way can be formed within a few days. What all habits have in common though is that, once formed they will never go away. Kind of scary, isn’t it?
There are many different kinds of habits, for instance habits that secure our survival like learning how to walk. If we had to decide each time which step to put forward next, we would get crazy. Our brain would constantly be focused on how to do simple, repetitive tasks instead of engaging in new, more important ones.
Since we form new habits by making choices – most choices we make rather serve our lazy self – we have many habits we are not even entirely aware of. Some habits affect our live more than others. Some are beneficial and lead to health, wellness, happiness, great relationships, success and wealth while others lead the opposite way. Some habits have drastic consequences and others only minor consequences in our lives. Some habits such as smoking, consuming too much alcohol or use other drugs can offset or set in motion several less powerful habits. They literally cause a chain reaction of several more habits that are either beneficial or not.
One of these beneficial habits that are followed by other positive ones is exercising, for instance. Once you exercise daily, you need to drink more water. Then you feel less hungry and eat less heavy food. After a while you develop the desire to eat more healthy food so that exercising becomes easier. In the meantime you start losing weight what motivates you to adopt other positive habits and keep that healthy lifestyle.
Improving the quality of sleep and getting enough sleep (7.5 to 8 hours every night) is another such power habit that creates a domino effect. You lose weight easier and faster, you have more stamina during the day, you are more focused and concentrated, and you have more energy to go out and so some exercise.
Smoking on the other hand can negatively offset the benefits of daily exercising and healthy eating. Because of the many toxins cigarettes contain, the body gets a load of toxins it has to deal with what inevitably leads to weight gain.
The trick is to stick to a new habit long enough so that your brain begins to form new neural pathways. If you give up too soon, the brain will quickly and easily force you back into your old habit and all the effort, time, and energy was wasted. The next time you are making another attempt to change that particular habit, it will be even more difficult to eliminate it. It is necessary to stick with your desired habit long enough so that the brain has enough time to form new neural pathways. This is one reason why over 90% give up on their New Year’s resolutions every year. Poor habit is also responsible for the fact that more people want to become rich than actually are rich…they are just not willing to form the habits which are necessary to achieve success.
Another reason is that people don’t really know how to change their habits and are trying to do it with willpower. But willpower is only needed at the beginning to decide on the new habit. What you will need after that is patience, perseverance and consistency. Most people make the mistake to use the little willpower they have left to keep going, not realizing that willpower is only the initial power. After that it requires discipline to show up every day for a certain time, patience, and perseverance until the new habit (be it weight loss habit, success habit, or any other habit) will be formed. These are also qualities we need to develop to be slim, healthy and successful in life.
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What is very important for that part of habit forming is a strong why. If your life depends on, the chances are much bigger that you will succeed with your habit forming process than just being angry at yourself for giving up too soon.
If you’d try to outsmart your bad habits by taking a weight loss pill or by getting a gastric surgery done, for instance, your habits would still be effective and the struggle would go on and on.
There are much easier ways to change habit than trying to come up with more willpower than you have. One way is to transform them instead of trying to eliminate bad habit. Habits can’t be eliminated anyway. Once the neural pathways are there, the old habit will remain. The only thing you can do is replacing the poor habit with an even stronger positive one. There are some smart ways you can use to fool the brain into collaborating and embracing a new habit. However, if you don’t know how to do that, the chances that you’re going to lose that war are big.
Our body always follows the rules of nature and is most of the time smarter than the person sitting inside of the body. But once we begin to understand the nature of our bodies, how it works, what it needs to accomplish, and how we can rather support our body instead of trying to force something onto it, we become a team and changes will be much easier and more effective. Then you will be the smart leader and your brain/body will become your enthusiastic partner supporting you in your weight loss goals.
As soon as you let your brain become your partner, habit change can occur almost instantly. Such an immediate habit change makes your whole life a lot easier and things can begin to change immediately as well.
Weight struggles and poor health have mainly to do with some poor habits, and once these habits have changed, our lives will immediately begin to change as well. Weight loss then becomes much more effortless and better health will be another consequence.
The better you and your body become as a team, the faster and easier you can begin to transform other poor habits as well and your live will drastically improve in any regards.
Happy weight loss!
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Sоmе оf these habits are simply about kеерing our body funсtiоning рrореrlу but a lоt оf habits have to dо with the way wе do things, move, behave, react to people, situations and circumstances; the way we think and perceive our environment. Unlеѕѕ we livе in a ѕоlitаrу wоrld with no intеrасtiоn with thе rеѕt оf thе wоrld оr thе people thеrеin, wе will аlwауѕ bе соnfrоntеd with ѕituаtiоnѕ where wе must mаkе сhоiсеѕ, and these choices often happen within a split second by bypassing our conscious mind. Sоmе are simple, ѕоmе are more соmрlеx like whаt tо еаt оr what not tо еаt, when to exercise and when to relax. Many оf them require nо thought though since our brain is already pre-programmed tо асt in a helpful wау in our body’s terms. We hаvе done something wеll or inappropriately in thе past and our brain hаѕ received fееdbасk (it wеnt wеll, do thаt аgаin; аltеrnаtivеlу thаt wаѕ rubbish, do ѕоmеthing differently). Cоnѕеԛuеntlу the unconscious part of our brain iѕ full of wауѕ of dеаling with situations that wе thоughtlеѕѕlу еmрlоу to make our lives easier.
You just can’t conquer habit with willpower. The only way to optimally dealing with habit is by understanding the way our subconscious mind works and using it’s own way of forming new habits. By the way, strong willpower is a habit as well. Your ways of aproaching weight loss, your ways of pursuing a goal, your mindset, your motivation (or the lack of it), these are all habits as well and can – need to – be trained.
How many times did you decide to exercise three to four times a week and then something came into your way? You thought, “Well, what does it matter. It’s just once.” But then something else came up, the weather wasn’t to your liking, your child looked like he might get a cold…and then there was the point where you realized that you haven’t been to the gym for two weeks and now you have lost all your motivation?
One of my current members recently had some great success simply by following the daily action steps in my free Facebook group. Then Christmas came, New Year came, now we are two weeks into the new year and she almost disappeared.
Here are 30 signs of self-sabotage:
And here is the big problem.
Then check back on your bigger WHY – the reason WHY you wanted to lose weight in the first place. At this point it may also help to go deeper with your WHY, away from your own person to a bigger purpose. 
The second time I really struggled a lot was with my self-growth business in the 1980s. I was a single mom and I wanted to be with my daughter as much as possible. So I decided to build my own home-based coaching, seminar, and public speaking business. I did all right from the get go and we were lucky enough to always have some food on the table. And though some months I couldn’t pay my bills, I could always pay them the next month. However, I was never able to save any money for my daughter’s college or buy some special things like new furniture, a car, or nice clothes. It was just enough for what we really needed. And I was trying really, really hard.
The interesting thing is that it took other coaches like Marianne Williamson, Geneen Roth, and Jon Gabriel more than a decade to come up with similar solutions, but all of them only offer parts of what I have found. What I was allowed to “download” from the Universe back then is still true today and I still teach these same principles in all of my workshops, seminars, and programs. And I am very surprised that I am still one of very few holistic weight loss coaches who can do that kind of work.
Because I know that so many women have been struggling with their weight for years and just don’t seem to be able to find a way to lose their weight for good. They are all on a completely wrong route. With a small mindset shift and a new weight loss strategy, their weight struggle could end almost instantly. 
It’s the letting go that is a very important part of your weight loss process. 
Since I have talked about the diet approach many times, I want to make this short. Dieting is against the body’s own nature and therefore can’t work long term. Going on a diet can give you some short term results but the weight will come back after a while. Depending on how many diets you have been trying or will choose to try, the constant up and down usually goes on for years and the person will eventually come to a point where she will resignate and give up all weight loss attempts.
Exercise alone has never been a fast tactic. Although exercise should always be part of a sensible weight loss strategy, it’s far from being fast nor maintainable. You can jog for an hour every day and 365 days and you may not even lose a pound. Believe me, I did it and that was the results. Zero weight loss.
Like with any diet, at the beginning you may lose a lot of weight very quickly. But after a while you will gain it back because you didn’t take your body’s nature into consideration. You can’t fool your body.
In my humble opinion this is the most stupid way of losing weight, and any doctor who offers that kind of surgeries should be put in jail for a long time. Gastric surgery is slow murder.
Although a healthy lifestyle ABSOLUTELY has to be part of a maintainable weight loss strategy, by itself it’s not a fast method and very often not even a lasting solution. The healthy lifestyle approach looks at weight issues exclusively from the physical standpoint and that’s never enough to make losing weight to last. Inner causes will not be transformed. 
My 4 Pillar system takes the whole person, the whole being into consideration. We are body, mind AND spirit. We can’t solve a problem just on the physical level by ignoring the other parts of our beings.
Changing your diet may bring you a step ahead.
To make it easier for you, I have created a Facebook page with daily tiny baby steps that build up on momentum. Each step takes between 5 and 15 minutes. And if you follow these steps every day at the same time, soon your momentum will begin to snow ball and you will experience what one of my members is experience. 
Thirdly, your current weight is another number that sticks to your subconscious mind and whenever you go on a diet, your subconscious mind will do everything to get back to that number. It’s like with your air conditioner. When you set it to a certain degree, the system will constantly adjust the temperature. When it gets warmer than you chose, the system will cool down; when the room gets colder, the system will heat up. It’s the same with your weight because your body doesn’t understand that you want to get rid of that extra weight and it will always bounce back unless you eliminate the real causes. 
Therefore my friend, patience is one of the first attributes you will need for your maintainable weight loss success. We are talking about a long-term goal here. We are not talking about a few weeks or months, we are talking about your healthy LIFE….a maintainable healthy lifestyle you can easily follow through with for the rest of your life without starving and without stress. 
“You could eat the best foods every day, but if you don’t exercise, you are not going to be healthy. Or you could eat the best food, and you could exercise an hour a day, but if your thoughts are always negative, if you are always harboring thoughts of doubt, worry, anger, guilt, jealousy, helplessness and hopelessness, there is no way you’re ever going to be vibrantly healthy.” –Dr. Susan Smith Jones
You may moan about the fact that losing weight for good is a little bit more complex than just dieting. But as soon as you realize how much more effective a weight loss strategy is than dieting, you will begin to love it. It’s not complicated and – again – it can happen by taking baby steps and simple changes. Besides, what is fast about yo-yoing? 
Dr. Susan clearly says that diets don’t work, and she recommends, “You want to throw away any diet book you might have that tells you that you can lose weight and keep it off without moving a muscle.”
If you want to lose weight, a minimum of half an hour of aerobic exercise every day is the minimum. Then make it a commitment to add some muscle training three times a week for 30 minutes consistently for the next six months. Within those six months, your body will add ten extra pounds of lean muscle tissue, and these ten pounds of muscle tissue will burn 500 more calories a day. These muscles will help you lose weight faster.
Commitment to a weight loss program – of course, it has to be one that has the chance to bring you lasting results and no diet can ever do that for you – can lend stability to your everyday life. Because, with each daily action, you reaffirm your commitment, and that brings a feeling of empowerment and increased self-esteem. Now, instantly, your energy changes and people around you can sense that as well.