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Can't Kick a Bad Habit? You're Probably Doing It Wrong
Kicking a bad habit
- Identify the behavior you want to stop: e.g, not eating processed sugar.
- Choose one specific food to cut from your diet. It needs to be something you wouldn’t miss.
- Diets don’t work because they are temporary fixes. To become part of your identity, the commitment needs to be forever.
- Write down what you no longer eat and the date you gave it up. Writing this down marks the shift from a temporary “can’t” to a permanent “don’t.”
- If the commitment feels like too much, you’re doing too much.
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Key Ideas
The Paleo Diet
The Paleo Diet is an effort to go back to eating how we’re biologically designed to eat, allowing us to tap into our genetic potential and start living healthier immediately.
Lose weight on the Paleo Diet
- Eat fewer calories than you burn every day.
- Eat mostly real food if you want to be healthy.
- Do those two things consistently for a decade to KEEP the weight off.
When you only eat real food and avoid all unhealthy food, you’re more likely than not going to run a caloric deficit – and thus lose weight.
Eat the following:
- Meat – GRASS-FED, not grain-fed.
- Fowl – Chicken, duck, hen, turkey.
- Fish – Wild fish, as mercury and other toxins can be an issue in farmed fish
- Eggs – Omega-3 enriched cage free eggs.
- Vegetables – As long as they’re not deep-fried, eat as many as you want.
- Oils – Olive oil, coconut oil, avocado oil – think natural.
- Fruits – Fruits have natural sugar, and can be higher in calories, so limit if you’re trying to lose weight.
- Nuts – High in calories, so they’re good for a snack only.
- Tubers – Sweet potatoes and yams. Higher in calories and carbs.
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Key Ideas
Building habits
The basic process for building all habits is basically the same: you repeatedly condition the behavior you want, over time, until it becomes automatic.
But no habit starts out automatic; there’s a deliberate period, where you must consciously apply yourself to make a certain behavior your default.
Conditioning a habit
- Classical conditioning: a paired association with a trigger and a behavior. Going to the gym after you wake up each morning is this kind of habit.
- Operant conditioning: you not only associate a trigger with a behavior, but you reward that pairing, to accelerate the habit-forming process.
The 30-Day Trial
You commit to some change for 30 days, then tou can go back to your old ways. But having spent thirty days applying a new behavior is often enough to convince you to stick with it.
Pros:
- Can handle more significant/difficult behavior changes you might be unlikely to start with a perpetual commitment.
- Fosters an experimental mindset, rather than assuming you already know what’s best.
Cons:
- 30 days probably isn’t enough to actually make something a habit.
- Without a long-term plan, many 30-day trials will revert back to the original behavior.
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Willpower is Limited
Though companies like Nike try to ignite our willpower with their slogans, ultimately willpower cannot squash our subconscious and unconscious behavior.
Repetition of action and thought can make the required change seep into us, turning it into a machine-like, habitual behavior.
Knowledge is not Enough When It Comes To Bad Habits
Just merely knowing something is good or bad for you is not going to give you any benefit, unless the implementation is done. Conscious knowledge cannot change your behavior, one has to make necessary changes to successfully act in self-control.
If you know that you will eat junk food because your refrigerator is filled with it, remove all the junk food.
Adding Friction To Bad Habits
Just as removing friction aids in doing the activity more often, adding friction can aid to remove the bad habit, by making it difficult or cumbersome to do so.
Example: Cigarette smoking declined due to adding taxes, banning in public places and removing from vending machines.