Are your habits acting like a straight jacket keeping you fat and unhappy?

What if you were able to install NEW habits – ones that made your goals more easy to achieve, habits that made your body and your lifestyle more in tune with who and what you want to be?

Learning how to establish new healthy habits is a secret that can be the deciding factor in achieving your New Year’s fitness resolutions and beyond. Once you get the process down, and it’s not hard, you will possess a awesome new power for self-change that can totally transform your life.

Here’s how it works…

Set Your Goal

 

Pick a small achievable goal that fits into the bigger picture of the lifestyle change you are working for, Try not to be both specific and also not too broad.

For example, “running four days a week” is a goal which works much better with this method than “eating breakfast every day, going to the gym and getting eight hours sleep.” Those are all good goals, but breaking them down into smaller pieces and working on them one by one is a much more successful approach here.

Establish a Trigger

You can think of your “trigger” as an action that signals for you to begin your new habit. This is an important part of why the method works psychologically. Continuing with running as our example a trigger could be drinking a glass of green tea or coffee every day before you immediately run.

Your trigger will stay the same as long as you work with your new habit. Many people are more visually orientated, in which case something as simple as laying your running gear out each day before work could act as a trigger to run when you return home. Experiment and see which type of trigger works best for you.

Keep it as Fun as Possible

 

If there’s any way you can spice up your new healthy habit to make it more fun and exciting, do it! The more pleasure you can keep associated with it (or pain with NOT doing it) the better.

This can be as simple as always listening to music you love while exercising or seasoning the healthy food well to make sure it consistently tastes outstanding.

Don’t Stop

Skipping doing what you need to do with your new habit before it sets in will take you back to step one. It’s essential you force yourself to do it for these early days even if it seems uncomfortable.

Remember, the nature of our minds is to strongly resist even positive change and to try to keep us in our comfort zone. Which is the last place we want to be when getting ourselves into the best shape of out lives!

21 Days is the Target

Most experts agree it takes roughly 21 days for a habit to be established. After that we can expect our “inner selves” to start working with us, not against us. If you can keep it going that long, which I know you can, things will become much easier. After that pick a new healthy habit and repeat!

Have you picked a new fitness habit to get started with? I hope so!