In the fall of 2019, I listened to the book Atomic Habits and immediately felt like I could absolutely build new habits in my life to become healthy.  In fact, I felt so confident that I could change my life with habits, that I told my boss I was going to lose 100 lbs.  She high fived me and said ‘let’s celebrate’ and I laughed told her I hadn’t lost any weight yet, but she insisted I schedule a future celebration in her calendar, which I did and we celebrated at the 50 lb mark.  I may have decided on my own accord to bump that celebration out a few times, but that’s beside the point!  We currently have another celebration booked in her calendar for when I reach the 100 lb mark and if I have to bump that one out too, so be it.  I told her the first celebration was immensely helpful to me and that I needed another and she quickly agreed and even suggested a more epic celebration that the first one.  I am so grateful for the support and have found that if you are vulnerable and honest with your struggles and what you are going through, people are generally willing to do what they can to support you. 

These celebrations have been super motivating in helping to keep me on track. My 100 lb aspiration wasn’t yet a goal and I didn’t know yet how I would do it, but I KNEW habits would change my life and I knew I would be able to apply the methods learnt in the book.  Looking back, it’s comical I felt that confident as I’m a chronic self-doubter.

Something about habits clicked with my brain, especially as someone with a background in positive reinforcement dog training. I was ready to become healthy and from the beginning, I wanted to do it in a sustainable way.  Speed wasn’t important to me, sustainability was.  In other words, I wanted to focus on building lifelong habits, building good habits and breaking old habits.  I do not have the strength to lose 100 lbs only to gain it back again. I knew I had to set myself up for success from the start.  My journey was not a diet, and I wasn’t looking to do something short term only to go back to my old ways that got me here in the first place.  It was a lifestyle change I was looking for and that has been my focus over the past three years.   I knew that in order to change, I had to actually change!

While I started this blog with the goal of losing 40 more lbs, weight loss was never my main goal, but has been a welcome side effect of changing my habits.  In fact, it felt way too overwhelming in the beginning to focus on a weight loss goal.  It was too much pressure and how could I focus on a weight loss goal anyways, when I didn’t really have any reliable healthy habits in my life and in fact, had a multitude of bad habits?    

It’s taken me over 3 years in my journey back to health to finally have the confidence to have an actual weight loss goal.  Yes, I had an initial aspiration to lose 100 lbs, but an aspiration is simply a hope or ambition of achieving something.   A goal is an objective target or end point.

I wanted to share with you a list of the habits that I first focused on. I really had to get curious about myself and investigate WHY I was doing certain things like binging on pizza or WHY I wasn’t making home cooked meals and WHY I was regularly purchasing take out lunches at the office for example.  Once I figured out the root, I was able to tackle the issue with a habit.

For instance, I used to grocery shop on the weekends so we would have food in the fridge for the week.  However, I would often end up ordering takeout for dinner and ultimately throwing out much of our food that had gone bad (how wasteful).  Why was that?  Why was I constantly ordering dinner even though we had food in the house we could cook?  After some pondering, I realized the root of my issue was CLEANLINESS.  As I was in a cycle of binge eating at this time, I would eat and then spend my evening hours digesting my meals on the couch.  This meant that both laundry and dishes would pile up along with general untidiness of the house.

For ME to cook dinner, the kitchen must be tidy.  When I come home from work tired, I do not have it in me to first do all the dishes, then cook, then do dishes again so I ordered take out regularly.  This was my pattern that I had to break.

To break this habit, I had to set my environment up for success and make things easy.  It is for this reason, that my first habit was simply to pick up after myself and to ensure the dishes were done each day.  This may seem silly, but this was foundational and critical to my success.

Some other habits from my early days were as follows and I tried hard to never miss two days in a row in the beginning stages of building a new daily habit:

• Weekly weigh ins
• Keeping a food journal (this was more to simply observe my daily eating patterns initially)
• Daily gratitude practice
• Flossing my teeth
• Bring a homemade lunch to work OR purchase a healthy lunch
• No more lattes (which often came with a croissant)
• Re-assess my values and habits monthly
• Daily movement (this was and still is nothing fancy and could be something as simple as a walk)

The book Atomic Habits led me to the book Tiny Habits which I later listened to and followed BJ Fogg’s advice to create a habit recipe.  A person can even join a free 5-day program to learn the Tiny Habits method.  Anyways, I had created a habit recipe for myself to start to floss.  My dentist mentioned gingivitis and that I should floss and so I decided to make a habit around it.

Initially, I tried to floss after brushing my teeth before bed, which just makes sense, but often I was too tired to take 5 extra seconds to stand there and floss before bed.  My habit recipe to floss after I brushed my teeth was not working so I changed my anchor moment (aka cue).  My new recipe was to floss after sitting on the couch and to make things easy, I keep floss on the table next to the couch both upstairs and downstairs.  Oddly, this is a habit I have kept to this day, I never did transition to flossing after I brush my teeth and that’s ok!

I KNEW my flossing habit was really working when I went to my friend Farrah’s house one day and sat on her couch.  I suddenly had an intense craving to floss my teeth.  I told her, I know this seems weird, but do you have any floss?  She did and I sat on her couch flossing my teeth and then it hit me!!  I had conditioned myself to be CUED to floss my teeth after sitting on a couch.  This is the BRILLIANCE of habits, when you build them right you are CUED to do the habit without having to rely upon yourself to actively THINK about doing the habit.  Genius.  Thank you BJ Fogg.   

Peace, love & plants,

Michelle 🙂

p.s. What are your own aspirations?  Can you think of some habits you might benefit from creating to help move you towards your own dreams?  Can you also be compassionate with yourself and treat yourself like a friend when things don’t go exactly as planned?  When embarking anything new, please expect that there will be obstacles.  Change is hard.  Learn to deal with obstacles that arise with a compassionate heart and a curious mind, and I have no doubt you can achieve whatever you set your mind to. 😊