Habits Destroy Weight Loss Plans (even if it’s a brilliant one!)

Habits are what’s stopping us from being who we really want.

Can habits really destroy our lives…

Learning to control habits should be a top priority!

No matter how great your goals are, or how brilliant your diet plan is, they’re no match for bad habits. They’ll fail again and again until you change your mind.

Handling your habits must be at the forefront of any weight loss plan. Without that, it’s like trying to navigate treacherous seas without guidance.

I’ve been there many times as I’m sure you have. To change it, we must strengthen our determination to get our habits under control. We must discover a better way to work with them so we’re no longer a victim of them. Are you game?

How are habits created?

Do you remember when you learned to drive or tried to learn something new?

We practiced and practiced until it became a routine for our brains. Then we got really good at it and it became effortless. There was also the reward of achievement as you got better and better.

The brain loves routine because it can conserve energy that way. The brain uses a lot of the body’s energy resources even when we’re asleep. So of course, its purpose is to try and conserve more and more energy for living. So one of its functions is to create patterns or routines it can put on automatic. These use less energy.

So we see that creating habits can actually be a good thing. But when a habit becomes harmful to us — like putting on excess weight — we really need to learn how to take them off autopilot.

We have created all of our bad or negative habits ourselves. So the first step is taking responsibility for them.

The reasons that eating habits can be so ingrained is that they follow our core survival instincts and that food tastes so unbelievably delicious these days that the rewards for eating fattening foods are huge. They create such a wonderful endorphin rush that we just can’t wait to do it again and again.

What’s sad is those habits can destroy us by creating an unhealthy body that leads to such terrible diseases.

The worst thing is that we just go on creating excuses rather than confronting the problem head-on. Getting control of our habits and fully understanding the mechanisms that create them.

Let’s get control of our habits once and for all

One thing we need to understand is that research has discovered that it’s never too late to break a habit. We can always change our habits no matter how old we are.

And the strangest thing about rewards is that we don’t really know what we’re actually craving. So self-inspection and self-reflection are key tools in helping us find what’s really going on with us.

Remember earlier when I said the brain loves to put things on autopilot? Habits will just continue on happily until we take back control. The brain will only act on them when we consciously make it do that.

We can start to plot our habits by keeping a daily journal and then at the end of each day we reflect on all that occurred that day. By reflect, I mean to look over each part of the day starting from when we woke up to the present time.

When we reflect like this, we’re consciously directing our mind to view the past day. The mind cannot use autopilot for this. It must inspect it from the present moment. This can give us some amazing insight into our behavior. We’ll see the times we were on auto being driven by our habits. If we look closely when we catch one of these moments, we might find the triggers, cravings, rewards or other helpful information about them.

I strongly suggest you make a daily practice of self-reflection and keep a journal. You’ll begin to really see yourself like never before. Maybe some of your bad habits will fall away just by doing this action. It happens.

Try doing self-reflection every day

I hope you’ll try self-reflection every day and keep a journal. Both are great tools for consciously taking back control of your own life. We all want that right?

Write to me and tell me about your experiences. Go to the website and fill in the contact form.

For links to more information on self-reflection and habits, see the show notes for this episode on our website at weightlossmindset.co.

In the next episode, we’ll expand on this further so we can really start to use our brain for what it was intended for, living the best life possible.