Small habit changes can lead to big changes...

rosevalleygirl23
rosevalleygirl23 Posts: 55 Member
in Health and Weight Loss
I watched this Tedx talk today. It's an introduction into a theory about behavior change.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdKUJxjn-R8&feature=share

This thought really resonated with me:
Relying primarily on motivation or willpower to change your behavior is a losing strategy.

This is so true for me! I need my habits to change not to test my willpower 15 times a day!

Health changes like losing weight are actually the culmination of dozens of tiny changes. In order to get changes to take hold and stick your must have three things: motivation, ability, and a trigger. What you do is piggy back the change you want onto to something that is already in your routine. But you have to make sure you really want that change and are capable of doing it.

I guess this is where so many of us have failed before. We might have a burst of motivation but we make our goals too hefty and we have trouble living up to them. We fail. We don't get the rewards from our successes and our motivation plummets.

Over the summer and before I had even stepped on a scale, I tried a series of tiny and not so tiny changes. It's what lead to me logging daily on mfp. I used the website healthmonth (a beta website that gamifies goals) to keep track of my progress. One of my first goals was flossing. It's weird but adding flossing to my daily routine has helped me achieve my bigger weight loss goals.

Seriously...Flossing!

The first month I said I wanted to floss and exercise 4 times a week (I couldn't pull off the 4 times a week). So the next month I tried limiting soda and exercising 3 times a week (still flossing). The third month I switched up to 10,000 steps a day and logging 5 days a week on mfp. Bingo! After 3 months of making some changes I was primed to and ready to accept changes and was feeling really good about the successes. Until the third month there was absolutely no weight loss, but that was the big goal not the little one. I needed to make some smaller changes first and I personally really enjoyed the successes. Once a few pounds started to come off I celebrated that success and was super motivated to keep those pounds lost in the win column. I started to fill out more of my mfp profile and set some goals. What's interesting is that when I first logged into mfp, I wasn't trying to limit calories so much as just trying to get into the habit of logging food.

I currently want to add weight training to my routine. I think my first small step will be to read a few pages of the book I checked out from the library.


If your interested in more info on small changes and some behavior theories, here's a book I checked out from the library.
http://tinyurl.com/kaizenbook

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