Jill

In this podcast episode, I discuss the book Mini Habits for Weight Loss by Stephen Guise and his strategies for avoiding bad habits and staying focused on healthy habits, specifically in the context of weight loss. He suggests eight strategies for getting away from bad habits, such as direct resistance, negative reinforcement, and substitution. He emphasizes the importance of making small, consistent changes and being mindful of our choices. He also encourages listeners to focus on adding healthy habits rather than just subtracting unhealthy ones and to avoid making moral judgments about our behavior. Ultimately, he argues that lifestyle and weight are closely linked and that gradual changes can lead to lasting results.

Transcript

[Music] Have you ever wondered what kinds of skills can you use to help you avoid bad habits, so you stay focused on the habits you want to have.

That’s what we’ll talk about today.

[Music] “99% of failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses.

” George Washington Carver Today we’re going to continue our conversation, “Mini Habits for Weight Loss” by Steven Geiss.

So up to this point we talked about why mini habits work, how we can make mini habits work for us, and now we’re going to have some helpful hints about how to keep habits, make habits stronger, and make the things that go against our habit go away.

He gives eight strategies to help us get away from anything.

So you could just stop doing it, which he calls direct resistance.

We’re not going to do it anymore.

We can limit it.

That’s weaning off, he says.

We can stop buying it.

So if we’re having trouble with ice cream, we stop eating ice cream because we never buy ice cream.

That’s my strategy.

I’ll tell you right there.

I talk about it in other podcasts where I won’t buy snacks at the grocery store.

to have them but I have to go out and get them so I’m pitting my laziness up against my desire to have ice cream.

He says that we can 4) do negative reinforcement so that there’s a consequence.

You have to put a dollar in a jar every time you have ice cream.

You have to give your friend a dollar every time you eat ice cream.

Some sort of a negative thing.

You can try to substitute it.

This is another strategy I make use of instead of eating ice cream and and substitute a bad thing for something that’s still sweet, but is a little bit better for me.

I got away from eating snack foods by getting those Klaassen pickles.

If you ever had that brand, they’re crispy, they’re crunchy.

When you bite into them, they kind of make that snappy noise.

So it feels like a snack and it’s salty and it has a lot less calories.

So I replaced snack foods with pickles.

It works a little bit and it works some of the time, Not all the time for sure.

The sixth strategy, he says, is to try to delay it.

Say, okay, I get you on ice cream, but let’s try to wait an hour and just see if we can get away from that initial craving, that initial momentum that’s going against us.

And that actually works pretty well.

I found it a particularly great strategy for budgeting.

Oh, I want this thing.

And you have it in your shopping cart and you think, oh, I’m gonna buy this awesome thing.

if you wait a couple of days you look at your shopping cart and you go, “How was I gonna buy that.

” The urge is gone.

That overwhelming desire for it goes away.

He says number seven, you could create an alternate way or pair it with a different reward so that we actually have a positive reinforcement.

So if I don’t eat ice cream I can go ahead and play video game for an hour.

So you’re pairing it with something else to try to get you away from doing it.

Or number Number eight, you actually make yourself do something first before you do the thing you want.

His example is if you want soda, which is unhealthy for you, then you can instead say, “Well, I have to drink a full glass of water before every time I drink a soda.

” And that way, you might be too full after you drink the full glass of water.

Maybe it satisfied your thirst, and so now you don’t feel like the soda anymore.

So this is another way, a healthy obstacle he calls it.

a little bit like that diet I read in the Teen Magazine where it had you eat like 60 different kinds of vegetables before you got to the chocolate.

He says it’s important that we try to do addition over subtraction and that means that if we constantly cut things out of our lives we’re gonna start feeling deprived of things or that we’re not living happy life or full life or we’re not all that excited about something.

It makes things feel less.

So if you decided you were going to play less video games because it causes you to exercise less, now you feel deprived and now you don’t feel like you want to do this plan anymore at all.

So instead if you’re actually doing less things it can be really difficult.

But instead what if we actually replaced it with something.

Instead of maybe playing video games you find an activity you really like to do then it will help you to that.

I have one of the Oculus Quest 2s and instead of sometimes sitting there and playing video games where I’m sitting down I’ll say why don’t you go upstairs and play with your Oculus for a while.

I have this amazing Star Wars game that I just am thrilled with and I can be standing there and actually moving a little bit for almost an hour or two instead of sitting on the couch for an hour or two.

So I’m adding something into my life instead of removing something to my life.

And he says that the more times we can avoid the things that will break us down, cause us to leave our system, have us go backwards on our behavior plans.

And if we can actually add to our life instead of avoiding things, we’ll suddenly find ourselves back on path because we’re not punishing ourselves by not playing video games or not watching TV or not eating that awesome thing.

We want to eat.

If you’re just constantly breaking yourselves down and making sacrifices and not getting to the thing that you want to do, you’ll start feeling sad about things.

You’ll start feeling like your willpower is waning.

And so instead he says we should think about this as if we’re training.

You know, when we try to do a new habit or a new skill, or he even mentions athletics, you know, imagine if you were going to take up archery and the first couple of times you shot an arrow out of a bow, you were terrible at it.

He says, okay, this is a new habit I’m just trying, I’m learning, I’m training, you would give yourself some grace about it.

But when it comes to things like weight loss or it comes to things like making new behaviors, we tend to be too harsh on ourselves.

Why can’t we say I’m training, I am training to eat better.

Alright so yesterday I didn’t do such a good job.

You know what I’m learning, I’m in training, I’m gonna learn to do better.

Make it a positive aspect instead of being a constant drag on it.

And he says in the end that lifestyle and weight are white on rice and cold on ice, meaning they’re bonded together, that we’re not going to lose weight and we’re not going to change our weight until we change our behavior, our lifestyle, and we become that kind of person who can lose weight.

He says that when we say the word can’t, we’re almost like a child saying, I can’t do this and I can’t do that.

And my parents say I can’t come over.

And the thing he calls the can’t strategy is not what an adult does.

There is no can’t.

Of course you can.

And of course you would.

The difference is, is that you are going to be the kind of person who does.

And you are going to be the kind of person who is in control of their lives.

And if you say can’t, you’re almost making it like you’re not an adult anymore.

That there’s some awful person out there who’s deciding you’re not allowed.

always remember that in the end you are control, which is why he says in the end, this is not a book telling you what you must do.

This is a book that is going to help you come up with habits and behaviors that will lead you to the thing you need to do.

So he gave a study where people were told to say, I don’t eat X and other people who are told I can’t eat X.

And then they tested to see which person followed through later with a healthier food choice.

And the person who says I don’t saw a 64% of the time that they actually followed the healthy choice but with the people who said I can’t only did so 39% of the time.

And he says that the reason that don’t works is because it’s something based on us.

Again I identify as someone who can lose weight.

I identify as someone who lives a healthy lifestyle.

The choice is yours.

When you say don’t, it’s because it means you picked it.

When you say I can’t, that means there’s some big bad person in your life controlling you and instead you are always in control.

You are the one who’s going to determine things that you do and the things that you don’t do.

And he says that in sometimes can’t might lead to a rebellion.

Oh I can’t eat desserts.

And then one day you you just bust out of it.

Who says I can’t eat desserts.

Look at me eating this whole gallon of ice cream.

I showed you can’t, you know, so it can cause even rebellion.

If we say the word can’t instead of saying don’t I don’t eat those kinds of foods because they don’t lead to a healthy lifestyle.

He says it’s important that we don’t make more morality choices based on this.

You’re not a bad person.

If you break your lifestyle choices, you’re not a good person.

If you keep your lifestyle choices.

These are all things that we just do.

These are activities that are going to lead us to a healthier lifestyle or will eventually lead us to a less healthier lifestyle, depending on what we pick.

But in the end, it’s not a moral thing.

It’s not a judgment and we’re not bad people.

The worst thing about it is, is if you’re trying to lose weight and you say, “Oh, I can’t lose weight.

I never give up dessert when I’m supposed to, and I never exercise.

” Now you’re depressed about it and you feel unmotivated for any of it.

And if you do that you’re gonna get farther and farther away from your goal.

I think that’s what happened to me when I got injured.

Well now I can’t exercise because I’ve injured.

Here I did all this great work, I lost 75 pounds and now I’m injured you know and I just got into that pity motion with the whole thing.

You can’t go there and you can’t make moral judgments on it.

What you do is you do the best you can at every choice.

And again, because we’re doing the mini choices, then we’re not going to fail because these are so small, we can’t fail.

He says, we’re not dogs.

Don’t treat yourself like a dog where we’re just hoping for the biscuit.

We’re hoping for the pat on the head, being told that we’re a good dog or a bad dog.

And again, our goal is not to lose weight.

Our goal is maybe to maintain the weight we have, or maybe our goal is not to gain weight, but again, we’re trying to change into a healthy lifestyle.

The weight is the thing that we’re gonna sort of look out the side of our eye and see if we’ve done better.

But he says to watch out for some of the exceptions, the places where we lose consistency.

Some of the times we’re with friends, we’re like, “Oh, well, I’m just with my friends.

“We’re gonna just have a good time tonight “and I’m gonna go back to it.

” When we make too many exceptions, then we’re gonna break out of that behavior change, that habit change, and then we’re going to eventually break out of our healthy lifestyle.

He says the other thing to do when you’re thinking about living a healthier lifestyle is to make moving more a bigger part of your life.

If you like to dance, I used to work with someone who loved to dance.

She’d just put the music on and she would dance.

Even if you’re doing an unregulated activity, it’s better than sitting in the chair.

And if you could just even dance a little bit, maybe do a pushup or two while you’re waiting for your dinner to finish, those small moments are gonna help you.

And again, keeping that low bar, one pushup.

10 seconds of stretching, 10 seconds of moving, walking for one minute.

But when you always have the option to do more, sometimes you might do more, but that’s not the goal.

The goal is the tiny habit.

So the goal, he says, in the end is to be steady, which is important than doing something big.

Make sure that you eat enough and that you don’t trigger that scarcity mode.

You know, if you feel like you’re depriving yourself, you’ll just get into a bad place.

And he says, always remember you’re in control.

He says, quote, “When you’re in charge “and when your strategy is flexible enough “to adapt to your life and the subconscious desires, The gradual changes you make can last a lifetime.

See how important that is.

We’re changing for a lifetime.

And the side effect of all this is that we’re going to live a healthier life, be more mindful of our food and be more healthy.

He says that there’s no limits in his choices, that he’s allowed to go out and eat unhealthy foods if he decides he’s going to.

But he makes sure that it’s a very rare occurrence And it only happens from time to time.

And that you don’t want to get into this pit of choosing between the stupid salad I have to eat, and I always like calling my salad stupid, or the amazing forbidden food that you’re just craving to do.

If you’re going to change for a lifestyle, every once in a while, you’re going to have the French fries.

Just not going to do it that often.

You’re going to make it a special thing instead of a daily thing.

But in the end, brute force won’t make us happy.

It won’t make us have progress.

It’s going to be that slow, consistent lifestyle change.

And in the end, make it easy.

We’re going to put our clothes out.

We’re going to make our goals as simple as possible to get.

And we’re going to mindfully eat.

We’re going to pay attention to the things we’re doing because paying attention is the kind of thing a person who lives a healthy life, a person who can lose weight does, if you’re always just sort of buzzing through and not paying attention to what you eat, not paying attention to how you’re losing your time, not paying attention to how many days you’ve gone by without exercising or doing something healthy, that’s where it gets lost.

So us being mindful, us being in control, is going to help us every time.

And if you’re interested in learning more about tiny habits just in general, the very first podcast I did September 14th, 2020 talked about BJ Fogg and tiny habits and how you can break it up.

But it’s a fantastic book too if you care to read about it.

So I think this book is great.

It talks really about this fantastic strategy of getting in the right frame of mind to live a healthier lifestyle, to lose weight, to get your goals.

Again, he’s not going to tell you what to do.

I think that you probably know what it is you need to do.

There’s a movie called LA Story where one of the characters says she looks in the mirror and then she sees whatever is the first thing that’s most obvious to her and then she takes it off because it means it’s grabbing too much attention.

I think that’s the way it is with this small habits bit too.

You know what the one thing you could do that would make the biggest change in your weight loss or healthy living style, you know what it is.

For me it would just be measuring everything I eat and sticking to those measurements.

I I know what I need to do.

So now how can you build a tiny habit around that.

Maybe I just measure the amounts of fats I eat, knowing that if I have a little bit more of this or a little bit more of that, reducing the amount of butter or the amount of oil I eat would make the biggest change.

So making that small habit, again, so easy you can’t do, and picking it from your own life, you’re in control because you know what it is you need to change the most.

Alright, so my challenge to you is pick one thing that would make the biggest impact on your life.

Whether it’s losing weight, whether it’s saving money, and build one tiny habit, one mini habit around it.

Can you just measure the amount of food you eat for dinner.

That’s the biggest meal.

And if you just measure those things, you’ll have a much better go at it.

but come up with something that’s so small, takes under a minute and is impossible to fail.

Again, that one pushup.

And see if you can just build on one tiny habit, one mini habit, just this week.

All right, everyone, thanks so much.

I appreciate you listening to the podcast.

Please remember that I’m on Twitter and I’m trying to tweet new things out, give good ideas for you to have practical changes in your life.

And you can find my Twitter account, my email and all sorts of different ways you can contact me by going to my website, smallstepspod.

com.

And remember that you can change your life, your lifestyle, by taking small steps.

[MUSIC].

I discuss the concept of mini habits for weight loss, as outlined in the book “Mini Habits for Weight Loss” by Stephen Guise. The idea is to create small, easy-to-accomplish habits that can be built upon over time to create lasting change. The focus is on changing one’s identity to become the type of person who loses weight, rather than solely focusing on the number on the scale. The episode encourages listeners to figure out what kind of person they want to be and to start taking small steps toward that goal.

Transcript

[Music] Hello everyone, welcome to the podcast.

This is Jill.

Have you ever wondered how you can form mini habits.

That’s what we’ll talk about today.

[Music] Step one, write this phrase on a small piece of paper.

I change best by feeling good, not by feeling bad.

BJ Fogg, Tiny Habits.

Today we’re going to continue the conversation from the book, “Many Habits for Weight Loss, Stop Dieting, Form New Habits, Change Your Lifestyle Without Suffering” by Stephen Geis.

As I mentioned in the last podcast, this book is the book that I would love to write if I was ever going to write a weight loss book, but I don’t have to now because he wrote it already.

I think his ideas are just great.

He mentions that the problem with most of our diets, we talked about this the last time, that willpower is something that sometimes we have a lot of and sometimes we don’t.

You can’t force yourself to have willpower all the time.

Some days you have it.

And there are certain things he says that will deplete it.

Like doing other things that cause you to deplete willpower.

Maybe you’re doing great on your budget.

Maybe you’re doing great on cleaning your house and now you’re feeling less motivated to do your exercise and your weight loss items.

Depleting that willpower can make it easier for us to fall into other types of bad habits.

“Oh man, I cleaned my whole house today.

I chopped all the wood in my backyard.

I stacked everything up and I mowed the lawn.

I’m going to go out and get some hamburgers and french fries.

” See how that goes.

And he says that a way to get away from that is this mini habits system.

He says in the end, “A mini-habit is a stupid small behavior you do every day, and I say stupid small, because they are absolutely ridiculous and generally take one minute or less to accomplish.

” He gives some examples of it.

This book, again, is a great weight loss book, but it’s also a habit for anything.

Whether you’re going to learn how to play piano, whether you’re going to eat more vegetables, going to clean your house, whatever it is.

BJ Fogg talks about it like you’re going to floss one tooth if flossing is your end goal.

I started my cleaning habit in my house just because I don’t really enjoy doing it.

By every day when I’m making lunch, I clean basically one two by four area in my kitchen.

And by the time I’m done with the week, my whole kitchen is clean.

Or even this is something like one squat, one plank, one pushup, all very simple.

And something that is so ridiculous that of course you have to do it.

One pushup, of course I can do one pushup.

And so instead of getting our habits then to be what he says, usually now it becomes always because it’s so stupidly small.

And if we always do something and get away from usually doing something, then that means that you’re going to have that lasting effect.

And if you find yourself not doing it, maybe that’s too complicated or you haven’t picked something stupidly small enough.

And then he says that once you’ve done that one stupidly small habit, you’re always welcome to do more.

It’s not required.

My habit when I got into losing weight and when I lost the weight the first time was I just had to put on gym clothes and drive to the gym.

Very easy.

It was a little bit longer than a minute.

He’d probably say just put on your gym clothes.

But I sold myself.

I didn’t have to work out at the gym.

I just had to put the clothes on and drive there.

I lived very close to it.

I don’t think of any time, maybe once, where I actually left the gym without exercising.

But maybe that was too big.

talking about doing one push-up or doing one thing, eating one more sprig of broccoli, whatever it is.

Very small.

And in the end, what we do is whatever it is we’re planning on doing, in this case weight loss, the best way to get there is by making something simpler, smaller, and if we make the path harder, then we’re just not going to do it.

We’re not going to go after those things.

And so that’s why the mini habit is so great.

Says some things like exercise, if you’re gonna exercise with moderate intensity for 30 minutes, it’s nothing that we can change the intensity of it.

It’s moderate exercise, our heart rate has to get up to a certain place.

And so our perceived effort on that is always gonna be equal.

So then how can we make it even smaller.

How can we change that, what he calls perceived difficulty of a task and make it tinier.

And the answer to that is reducing the amount of time, reducing the difficulty.

Whatever the threshold is, we can make it.

And I’ve been working on the treadmill.

I just put the shoes on, walk for a minute, easy peasy.

Do I feel like walking more once I get on there.

Sometimes, but sometimes I don’t.

But that’s that mini habit that’s gonna help you carry through.

He says it’s not gonna be something about what we look like or what the scale says, although I find that very motivating, but only when they’re going my way.

They matter for measuring progress.

Again, when we talk about that, what we measure we can manage, but they’re not the primary thing we’re going after.

Again, we’re gonna build a system.

And he says, quote, “To succeed with weight loss, you must change into the type of person who weighs less.

If you do that, results will follow.

” So again, we’re building a system on it.

You can weigh yourself if you want.

I have a set of clothes that are just outside of my reach of what I can wear.

I have them sitting out.

And every week or so, I try them on to see if it’s getting better.

Those are all things you can do, but that in the end is not the goal.

Your goal is not weight loss.

Your goal is not healthy.

Your goal is to be the kind of person who loses weight.

Your goal is to be the kind of person who exercises every day.

These are your goals.

You’re trying to become a person who does the thing you want to do.

If you’re trying to become a writer, you’re the kind of person who writes.

That’s all it is.

You’re changing your identity into someone who does these things.

I think a lot of times, particularly me, until I lost all the weight, I thought, “I can’t lose weight.

“I’m not gonna be a thin person.

“I’ve never been a thin person.

” I remember when I was 10 years old that I figured out I was really overweight.

I felt overweight probably even before that eight, seven years old.

I mean, isn’t that amazing.

So I never thought of myself as someone who could be thin and maybe that was my problem all along because I was never thinking of myself as a person who could be thin as a person who could lose weight.

I never got there.

It seemed impossible to me all the time.

Now that I’m older and my metabolism isn’t what it was when I was 20 years old, I’m realizing it’s harder than ever.

But now I have more mental maturity than I did.

And so I believe that I can succeed where I didn’t in the past.

And if we become a person to see ourselves as the kind of person who loses weight, it helps me a little bit to have a role model.

I know my trainer, Heather, she lives a healthy lifestyle.

She is constantly pushing herself to have a healthy lifestyle.

And if she were to gain weight or get out of shape, not only would she have a harder time having the business that she has, but she would have a hard time doing the things that she loves to do.

So she is a great example of someone who maintains health.

She can be a real role model for me, and I can see that she lives in a system that allows her to do that.

But even if we go through this process where we think of ourselves as the kind of person who can lose weight, weight.

I am a person who loses weight.

It’s going to be things for preferences of eating better, of exercising, or at least not fighting the exercise so often, and increasing the power you have in your own life.

I noticed that when I lost weight the first time, I gained mastery over my budget because suddenly I learned who’s in control of this life.

It’s me.

I have control and once I lost weight I suddenly saw myself as a person who can control things.

It was life changing for me and so that’s what you’re going to see is that when your behaviors change you will change who you are and you will become the person who loses weight.

The person who has a good budget.

The person who gets done the things they want to have done.

I say it a dozen times on this podcast but me 15 years ago I couldn’t have done this podcast.

I would have done it a couple of to do the technological achievement and then I would have just stopped.

I would have pod faded.

Now I’m the kind of person who actually follows through on things and gets those things done even if someday I don’t feel like it.

Maybe I just want to take a nap.

But I like doing this and now I have the perseverance that allows me to keep doing it.

And that’s the kind of thing you get when you change your behavior, you change your systems, you become the kind of person who follows through.

You become the kind of person who loses weight.

And in the end, the problem with all of the things that are good in life is that they’re marathons and they’re not sprints.

The things we want in life take time.

They take effort.

They take perseverance over the long term.

And that means we’re not going to do perfectly every day.

That means we’re not going to do perfectly every week.

But for the most part, day in and day out, We’re going to do the thing that we want to do because we’re the kind of person who loses weight.

” And he says that if you’re the kind of person who thinks that you need results before you can get motivated, he says the opposite is actually true.

You will do the things when you change your systems, not when you actually lose the weight and think that you’re doing great.

I lost the weight and I screwed up because I had a bad two years, but it happened.

Instead, you have to be that person who lives that consistency of lifestyle that makes you a healthy person.

I’m Jill.

I’m a healthy person.

I’m Jill.

I’m the kind of person who loses weight.

I’m also the kind of person who balances my budget.

You can kind of see how that goes.

Consistency, that’s when you’re going to start gaining success.

I don’t want you looking for it because that’s where everyone goes wrong.

changing your behavior into the kind of person who exercises.

You’re changing your habits into the kind of person who does this every day.

And when we get that we’ll start having results.

I don’t know if you ever had a child but sometimes they’ll do something amazing for the first time.

Maybe they’re walking for the first time or they’re talking for the first time and you don’t want to freak them out.

So you don’t want to just stare at them like, “Oh my gosh the baby’s talking right because now the baby will just look at you and wonder what the heck happened instead you’re like no it’s a lot like oh yeah look over there the baby’s talking that’s kind of what we’re doing with our own system when we’re changing our habits and we’re changing our behavior and we’re starting to gain consistency we’re gonna look a side eye at that scale go yeah look at that like my lost about five pounds but we’re not making it the focus we’re making that as a side result of us changing our systems.

And he says quote “With many habits you’ll be designing your own battle plan.

” So he’s not going to give us what we’re supposed to do.

He’s going to give us a strategy so that we can change what it is we need to change.

Some people are great at exercise.

Right now I’m doing pretty good about exercise.

I go and see a trainer three times a week.

That has been the keystone of success for me.

I wish I could do it on my own all the time, but it has really changed my life.

And I do it with a friend because that helps bring down the cost.

I know that cost can be a real downside sometimes for doing some of the things we need to do.

But if you can get a friend, get some other people involved, it can really bring it together.

But you’ll have to decide what plan works for you.

Maybe you’re great at eating great but terrible at exercising.

Or maybe you exercise every day but you’re really terrible about how you eat.

The problem is is that it’s impossible to out-exercise your fork.

So I’m just eating too much and it’s usually nickel and diming myself with this little bit here, this little bit there, and I know I measured how big this stack of potatoes should be but oh I’m a little bit more hungry today and so I put a little bit more on.

These mini habits for me are going to be built around me nickel and diming myself out of losing weight.

But for you, it could be entirely different.

You might have different issues.

I think I saw once that one of the biggest struggles people have with weight loss is the social eating.

I know that’s a big thing for me too.

I get caught up when I’m out with friends on how many French fries I had.

And eventually I beg the waitress to take it away.

In the past, when I was losing weight, I actually asked for half sizes.

I paid for the full size half the time because they wouldn’t give me a half order, but I would only ask them to bring a half order out to my plate.

Or I would instantaneously put half of everything on a different plate and ask the wait staff to box it up for me so I couldn’t eat it.

I saw one thing where this woman couldn’t stop eating French fries and she just poured the whole bottle of salt on her French fries.

You’re going to have to decide exactly where your problems are, where you’re gonna have to put your effort, and where your biggest behavior changes are gonna have to come.

It’s not gonna be the same for you as it is for me.

But he says the important thing is that you do not have to be controlled.

Nobody does anything in life when you give up control.

When you force yourself into a thing, when you have a grandmother like I had telling me to stop eating this and stop eating that, and why are you dressed like this and why.

It never works.

We never keep it off.

We never change our lives when we’re being controlled.

We all have to make our own choices.

And he says the biggest thing too, is that you can’t be rushed into it.

Our expectations of weight loss are hard because again, we gained weight, you know, maybe a pound, a two pounds every week.

We’re not going to have this diet where in 30 days we’re going to be in our bathing suit and the magazines, they don’t help.

and websites will tell you, “Oh, look great in your swimsuit in 30 days.

” It’s not going to work.

We have to change our expectations that this is going to be a slow process.

And when you do, you won’t feel bad or crushed by your goals.

Remember, we’re going to be changing our behavior.

So we’re the kind of person who loses weight, and we’re going to be doing this long term.

If we just say, “I’m going to stop drinking,” or “I’m going to stop eating french fries,” or I’m going to stop doing whatever it is that you’re having to do, you’re going to feel awful about it.

So instead, we have to come up with a strategy.

Now we covered a lot of the book, talking about habits, talking about how we can get them to work for us.

And next week, we’ll talk about how we can make these habits work for us in the best possible way.

So my challenge to you is figure out what kind of person do you want to be.

Do you want to be the kind of person who loses weight.

Do you want to be the kind of person who makes healthy choices.

Come up with that statement.

And for the next week, try to wake up every morning and say, “I am the kind of person who.

.

.

” See if it works.

See if it starts empowering you.

Continue it if it’s working out well for you.

Hi everyone, thanks so much for listening to the podcast.

I appreciate it.

Please remember that you can contact me if you have any ideas for podcasts you’d like to hear, if you have any questions, or if you have anything that you would like me to answer for you.

And remember, you can become the person you want to be by taking small steps.

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The book “Mini Habits for Weight Loss” by Stephen Guise focuses on building a lifestyle system for sustained weight loss rather than following a specific diet plan. The book emphasizes the importance of forming small habits that compound over time and lead to lasting change. The author suggests focusing on what can be controlled and separating general motivation from momentary motivation. The goal is to make healthy habits a part of one’s lifestyle and build consistency over time.

https://minihabits.com/mini-habits-for-weight-loss/

https://www.udemy.com/course/weight-loss-mini-habits/

https://twitter.com/StephenCGuise

Transcript

[Music] Have you ever wondered if mini habits are good enough to lose weight.

That’s what we’ll talk about today.

[Music] Today we’re going to talk about the book from Stephen Geis, “Mini Habits for Weight Loss.

Stop Dieting, Form New Habits, and Change Your Lifestyle Without Suffering.

” I’ll say right off the bat that this book made me sad.

Why.

Because I think it’s the kind of book I would write if I were gonna write a weight loss book.

It really is a great book.

Not saying that I would write a great book, but what he wrote is a great book and I really enjoyed reading it.

I thought it was helpful for me.

As much as I talk about all the habits and, you know, particularly I like to talk about health habits, I still struggle with them myself.

I still struggle to get to the place where I can lose more weight, I can exercise more, I can do the right things.

I wish it was something I loved.

I love sitting things.

I love knitting and reading and doing podcasting and sitting is my thing.

Forming many habits around weight loss is a great start for me too.

I’m struggling with it maybe just like you are.

Now this book’s a little bit different than the last one we talked about.

He says that losing weight it’s not whether or not we can have a perfect diet for 30 days.

A lot of us do that, right.

We start off the new year, we’re excited to lose weight, we’re doing a great job, and I’m on day 14 of exercising every day.

We start off great.

Where we really maintain that healthy living, sustained weight loss is about lifestyle change in the long term.

I always see people talk about how they can get through their holiday party or get through the Christmas time or get through the long days of winter and keep their weight loss going.

But you know what.

In my mind it’s not what you do between Thanksgiving and New Year’s that causes weight gain.

It’s what you do from New Year’s to Thanksgiving.

It’s those other months that are really getting us the wrong way.

You are gonna screw up.

There are gonna be days where you don’t feel like doing it and this book is talking about what can we do to make a lifestyle choice.

The big thing is when you’re talking about doing systems or you’re talking about your daily habits.

This is a concept that Scott Adams came up with a long time ago because if you build a system around losing weight, not as a goal, but you make the system where you’re going to eat healthier, you make the system where you’re going to exercise more, you make the system where you’re going to get enough sleep, you make the system where you’re going to do all the things you need to do to be a healthy person.

That’s where this book is really going.

It’s about building a lifestyle system that will tilt the scales of you losing weight in your direction.

He says that we look at it all wrongly whenever we’re focused on the type or the quantity or we’re gonna do this diet or that diet or the keto diet or the green diet.

I always thought too that if you do a low carb diet it generally works.

I do believe that protein is better for you than carbs.

But if you also said that I was going to be on a diet where I only ate purple food or I stopped eating brown food, well if you stopped eating brown food that would get rid of all the chips, the potatoes, the rice, it would get rid of most snack foods.

So you can see that just shaving off a piece of food item typically helps us.

But the question is, are we getting obsessed by the wrong thing.

And then we might switch from diet to diet because this one didn’t work or that one didn’t work.

And instead, he really wants you to think about your life and your lifestyle, that it’s not this 30 day, eat this exact food, eat my exact menu plan and you will lose weight.

He says, “This is a lousy strategy that consistently fails and people have tried everything to get it to work.

” You know it, you have seen all the diet books out there, You’ve seen all the diet systems out there.

And we have never had more diets than we do right now.

I remember as a high school teenager, we would look at it, me and my friends, we would look at everything we could do.

Oh, there’s these little cubes in their weight loss suppressants.

Let’s eat the tiny cubes.

Oh, this is a diet where you can eat X, Y, and Z.

Let’s eat that instead.

The funniest diet I saw when I was in high school came right out of a teen magazine.

And I thought this was actually pretty clever.

It had this scale where you ate one celery stick, you ate two things of broccoli, and it went up by number.

Then you would eat three beets, you would eat four things of asparagus, whatever.

You kept going up by number, by number, by number.

And if you got up to, I don’t know what it was, number 60, then you could have a piece of chocolate.

But by that time, you’ve eaten 400,000 different varieties of vegetables, and you probably no longer feel like eating your chocolate anymore.

But he says that all these diets don’t work for us in the long time, we don’t stick to them, we lose our joy in life, it’s really not helping us to maintain that healthy lifestyle.

When I lost weight before I got injured, I did it just through perseverance of good habits.

My trainer, Heather, she set me up with this great plan where I would look towards my calories, I would look towards healthy foods, I would try to do the best I could, and an exercise plan.

And I just stuck to it every day.

Did I screw up.

Absolutely.

Did I have days where I didn’t do it properly.

Sure I did.

But you know what.

It was changing back into that lifestyle, which I’m trying to go back to now, that made it work.

Because it was about changing my systems as compared to following a diet.

So he says that that’s what this book is all about.

It’s here to help you become better at that system.

He says, “Lasting change requires only one thing, consistent action over time.

A mini habit is designed to fit this requirement exactly.

No more and no less.

So he really wants to make this simple, easy for us to do, something that we can start out.

Examples, he says, you know, what is a mini habit.

And a mini habit might be one pushup, one plank, one squat a day, very easy to accomplish.

And if you were looking at going for a walk, it might just be a walk down the street, like 50 feet, and then walking back again.

So these habits are so small that we can accomplish them.

I think the whole world has a lot to thank BJ Fogg and his “Tiny Habits” book.

This is another one of those books, but it’s refocused towards weight loss, helping us see the many habits that we can take on that will make lifestyle choices for us forever.

And he says that what we can do is just focus on compounding effects.

We talked about that when we talked about atomic habits.

If you can improve just 1% every day, you compound that on itself.

If you ever saved for retirement, the retirement is on compounding interest.

You don’t put a dollar in and then in two years you have another dollar, it’s compounding.

So think about your efforts as compounding on each other.

You will start to build faster and faster.

And he wants you to think about what the impact of weight loss would be on you.

I mean, how would you feel.

My trainer, she used to do the funniest thing and it was the most miserable thing I had to do, but boy, it still has an impact on me to this day.

She had me walk around after I lost 20 pounds with a 20 pound weight, carrying it up four flights of stairs many times over and over.

That’s the weight you lost.

Does that feel good to carry it up the stairs.

Let’s keep going, ’cause you could get rid of another 20 pounds and think of how good you’ll feel.

And she’s right.

When you put weight back on, you feel it, and you know what you felt like, and now you know what you feel like now.

So having that imagery of what it would feel like to lose 20 pounds and no longer have to carry it, go find something that is 20 pounds and pick it up.

Wouldn’t you feel awesome if you no longer had to carry that around.

I know it was awesome for me, and that’s where I’m going back to.

And he says that if we form it into habit, it will impact us more strongly than if we just have the urge or the willpower to do it.

And he gives a study, we talk about this many times, that it takes 66 days to form a habit.

There are other studies out there.

I’ve seen anything from three weeks to 92 days, but just get the idea that habit forming takes time.

And once you get into the habit, you won’t even notice it because suddenly you’re just doing it.

There’s so many things that during the pandemic were hard for me, but then I was home every day and by myself and I didn’t have things distracting me to the degree I have them most times and suddenly I formed a habit and now it still is a habit for me.

So it’s one of those things that we have to go and form the habit and once we do then it’s autopilot.

We’re no longer expending will or at least much will in order to get there.

He gives the quote of Sun Tzu, “Victorious warriors win first, then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.

” You’re winning the battle before you even go into the battle, and that’s what he’s trying to get us to do.

And the goal, he says in the end, is to just make it a part of us.

A habit means that it’s built into us now.

Do you think about getting the mail.

No, it’s just a habit.

Do you think about brushing your teeth.

became a habit a long time ago.

So that means that it’s built into us.

Instead of these, “You have to want it.

You have to feel it.

” That’s what’s going to get us from the shoulds or the can’ts away from even the wants into do, done, I’ve accomplished this.

And when we do the other systems where we’re trying to base it on willpower, We feel lazy, we feel like a failure, and then we just think that we have failed the plan, when in fact, plans are built to fail.

They don’t bring about the change that we need in our brain, or the changes in our habit and our lifestyle that will give us the long-term effects.

And I know, I’m one of those people that when I do lose weight, it’s because I’m gutting it out, or I have that great desire and I’m putting it in front of me.

I told you, I have pictures of of adventures all over my house because I’m trying to encourage myself to want things that are typically very hard for me to want.

Do I have pictures of great knitted sweaters that I would hope I could knit someday.

I don’t.

I have pictures of hikes that I went on and I loved every minute of it.

So my motivations are about things that are adventures.

They’re not about me sitting in my chair wondering why I never lose weight.

He mentions that there’s motivations.

You know, if you decide that you’re going to go out to a bar with your friends, you could have a lot of different motivations.

“I don’t want to drink that beer,” or “I don’t want to eat those fries.

It’s not healthy for me.

I want to be healthy.

” Or, “Mm, that looks delicious.

I’m going to eat that.

I’m going to drink the beer.

” Or you want to feel good.

You want to have fun with your friends.

You want to have a good, exciting time.

Then you feel like you should eat it.

Then you think, “Oh gosh, I really want to lose weight.

I really should want to lose weight.

” And then you don’t eat it.

all sorts of things tugging at us all the time and what we have to do is first of all he says control what we can.

He says quote the first rule for living a good life is to focus on what you can control.

As such it’s best to separate these two concepts into something we can control.

General motivation and something we can’t fully control.

Momentary motivation.

So general motivation is I want to lose weight I want to be healthy.

Momentary motivation is that thing that rushes in on us, eat the french fries, drink the beer, have a good time with your friends.

That is so hard to control.

And our ability to have willpower is related to all sorts of things.

I know I feel excited to do my weight loss and to have willpower.

When I’m on a good streak, things are going my way.

Right now I’m down five pounds.

I feel great about it.

My willpower is high.

But I go out with my friends.

I want to go out with my friends.

we do our best thinking when we’re out at a restaurant.

Or you just want to have a good time or maybe today was a gigantic bummer and work didn’t go the way you hoped it was.

Or maybe you’ve just had 360 days of rainy days and you just can’t take it anymore.

And so you want to go out and eat and have a good time.

Those are those momentary motivations.

You’re driving by and you see the restaurant that you always love going to.

You’re right here, you got cash in your pocket, oh my gosh it’s dinner time and that momentary motivation overwhelms you.

He says in the end people gain weight in the same way that you lose weight in small steps.

We don’t put on 10 pounds in a day, we wake up a couple of months later trying to get into our swimsuit in summertime, now we no longer fit into our swimsuits.

That’s something that happened over time.

It’s these small choices.

It’s a small thing that happened.

When I got injured, I was laid up for two years.

I didn’t put all the weight back.

I didn’t lose all my fitness in one big swoop.

It just happened over the course of those two years.

Change is not going to happen fast.

You didn’t put it on fast.

You’re not going to lose it fast.

And even if you do, it means that you’re not changing your life in such a way.

I would love to tell you I lost 75 pounds.

It was the greatest thing that ever happened to me and you think I’m never going back I’m never putting on that weight.

It’s not gonna happen and then something happened.

I got injured.

I got depressed about it I sat there put it all back on again You are going to put on weight and you’re gonna take it off same way slowly And if you do it because you’re changing that’s what’s gonna help you He breaks up the part that the body really does not want to change.

It doesn’t want you to lose weight It doesn’t really want you to gain weight We have this set point system and you’ll see that rear its ugly head Whenever you have what they call a plateau, right.

You’re hammering away at your diet You’re doing all the things you had been doing and suddenly your weight loss stops.

And why is that.

It’s because our system is trying to maintain a life for us We have to have our body range in a very dedicated temperature, you know Somewhere like between 96 and a hundred and three degrees we can run when we get below or above that we start to have health Problems so our body is very focused on keeping us at the right temperature at Maintaining the right blood sugar at maintaining the right chemicals in our system and at some point When we change too much suddenly the body is like whoa, whoa, whoa Let’s slow down a minute and let’s figure out what’s going on An epidemiologist friend of mine told me that the body is essentially trying to give itself a pause even it means not losing weight To try to get back its equilibrium again.

That’s what a plateau is and I thought that was just genius Of course, our body is not used to it It knows how to keep Jill at this weight at a good temperature but if I drop 75 pounds, it suddenly has to relearn exactly how to keep me healthy at that weight.

It’s annoying, I will tell you, and I know you know it too.

You’ve probably all had plateaus where you tried to lose weight and it just got stuck there.

But again, we can overcome that by going through these very small habits.

So on this episode we talked about why mini habits would work and why we have to change our habits as compared to just trying to follow a diet instead and What we can use these mini habits to do so that we actually get the weight loss or basically any goal The book is about weight loss, but this system is fantastic.

It could help you with anything So my challenge to you is I want you to write down two types of motivations You have the general motivations which are the big things that we can control.

And then I want you to write down some of the momentary motivations that keep you from having those instantaneous moments of control.

Write those down and just take a look at them.

See what types of motivations are really controlling the strings here.

Next week we’ll talk about how to form better habits, mini habits, so that we can have some success in this area.

Arduin, thanks so much.

I appreciate you listening.

Remember, Please subscribe to the podcast and tell a friend.

I’m trying to grow the podcast and I appreciate all that you do, which helps me to get the word out to more people.

Hopefully, you’re helped by this podcast and I hope to help other people too.

And remember, you can form mini habits by taking small steps.

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