What will you be thinking when we get to 2019?
It’s January and gym are flooded with people determined to get in shape. Yes, losing weight is the most popular New Year’s Resolution, yet only 9.2% feel like they are successful in achieving their goals. New Year’s resolutions can be a great source of motivation to START working towards a goal, but motivation alone is not enough to make you REACH your goals long-term. There, however, science based steps you can take to MASSIVELY increase your chances of success.
Studies actually find the the key for long-term success isn’t motivation, but rather habit formation. A habit is defined as an action which you do automatically in response to a certain “trigger”, like when you automatically put on your seatbelt when you get into a car, or automatically washing your hands after using the toilet.
Developing a habit for a behavior is very different from maintaining motivation to carry out a behavior. Motivation involves the feeling of effort to do something, while a habit feels weird when you DON’T do it. When you reach this point, where an action feels like second nature: automation is said to have occurred. This means you don’t need to use “mental energy” to think about doing something.
To get the step-by-step breakdown of how to best build habits, check out our book Diet Like a Doctor. It also comes with the EBT Beginner Workout Program to help you get started in the gym!
Sources:
1. Statistic Brain Research Institute. Survey of 1,273 online respondents, 216 phone, and 73 in-person. Conducted January 1, 2017.
2. B Gardner. Making health habitual: the psychology of ‘habit-formation’ and general practice. Br J Gen Pract. 2012 Dec; 62(605): 664–666.
