Are you fed up with having to try and rely on self-control and willpower to make healthy choices?
Then let me help. As a Clinical Nutritionist specialising in weight management and behaviour change, I love nothing more than helping people find easier ways to achieve their health goals.
One of the key steps for lasting behaviour change is to minimise your reliance on self-control.
More healthy habits > more automation > less cognitive fatigue and perceived effort > higher likelihood that you will continue doing these things > and when we consistently do positive things we see health improvements > more brain space and effort freed up to give to other areas of your life.
While building habits can be really tough at first and require quite a bit of discipline, it actually buys you freedom in the long term.
So it really is worth sticking it out through the more challenging phase of the habit-building process because once you’ve created a habit, you’ve just made your life a hell of a lot easier!
If you want to start creating habits that help you move towards your health goals, this is my advice:
Firstly, start with only 1 or 2 habits you want to work on implementing at a time.
Second, look at what you are already doing every day or almost every day and find opportunities to tag or bundle your new habit into that.
This is exactly how I approach supporting my nutrition clients.
Rather than designing them a whole new routine, I look at what they are already doing - taking into consideration their schedule, commitments and preferences and we work to tweak and tag on or bundle up habits based on the priority of importance.
Once we’ve mastered one, we move on to the next and then the next.
After a few months they look back and without even really realising we have set in stone a whole new way of doing things… It’s no longer something they have to consciously think about doing… it’s just what they do now.