It doesn’t matter how hard some people try to maintain a healthy diet and consistent exercise regime they often find themselves giving up soon after they have begun. Old habits die hard and the bad ones can have a strong hold over your mind and behaviour. You may already be aware of your own bad habits, and when you embark on an attempt to improve your health and fitness you probably do a good job of cutting all of them out of your day. Despite this, most people are well aware by now that bad habits are very easily resumed, i guess we just need to ask any smoker about that. It will certainly go some way to providing you with health and fitness success in the future if you can understand where your habits have come from and how they develop.
Your diet and exercise habits are an outcome of learned behaviours. They tend to stick around when we don’t want them to because we have repeated these behaviours over and over most of our life or for many years.
Some examples of my old eating habits, which i practiced during my childhood and teenage years, included desert after dinner (usually ice cream), drinking tea with two sugars and plenty of full fat milk, sprinkling table sugar over my cereal and indulging in sweetened popcorn or chocolate on my visits to the cinema – you may be familiar with some of these BAD habits?
Of course these are old habits from my childhood that i strategically managed to lose over time (more on this later). The majority of our habits are formed during childhood and are usually influenced by our parents or guardians, who act as our role models. We copy what we see and we pick up what they do, just as they did with their parents and guardians. The food type, the environment that these foods are eaten in (i.e. at home or at the cinema), the foods we snack on and the physical activity and exercise we take part in are all habits developed in early life.
Perhaps you are a parent? If you practice unhealthy behaviours in front of your children they are highly likely to be passed onto them. As parents we need to be suitable role models for our children and give them the best possible start in life so that they avoid creating an array of bad habits, which are hard to shake off later in life. Good habits are just as easy to create as bad ones, but as we age they become more and more difficult to adopt and the bad are harder to let go of.
Your bad habits have probably been around for a long time, right? It’s time to accept that they do not need to be a part of your life any longer. You may have been thinking that you have to accept that there is nothing you can do, every time you cut out your bad habits they just come flowing back with a vengeance.
It’s never a good idea to cut out all your bad habits at once, you will overwhelm yourself, and it never works this way. The habits have been around most of your life remember, it takes time to eradicate them completely. Try removing one or two bad habits at a time. Lots of small changes like this eventually lead to one big change for which you will be very grateful. Doing it this way should allow you to easily maintain your new lifestyle for the rest of your life without the bad habits coming crashing back.
This is how i did it; i used to have two sugars in my tea with lots of full fat milk until i decided i needed to change it for good. First i cut out one sugar, next i reduced my quantity of milk, then i completely cut out the full fat milk and changed to skimmed milk, and finally i cut out all sugar. I did this gradually (over 4 weeks), so now when i have my tea i have zero sugar and a dash of skimmed milk. The thought of drinking it the way it was before just seems disgusting to me now.
It can be done it just takes time to cut things out – give it a try, cut something out today that you know is preventing you from reaching your health and fitness goals, no matter how small that change is just try it, you won’t even notice! As the weeks go by these changes add up and the end results are rewarding.
Now getting back to where diet and exercise habits come from, i want to finish by including some factors that can create habits later in life – that’s right, there not just all developed during childhood! Some factors to be aware of that can change your habits for the worse include:
- Living with a busy schedule and trying to maintain a balance between work and home – a lack of time and hectic environments can lead to poor food choices and a lack of physical activity.
- Your families food preferences can influence how you eat, your partner may do things which is different to how you do things before you met. You can adopt each other’s habits. If you still live at home you are unlikely to do the shopping, meaning you can end up eating what is available rather than what you need.
- Peer pressure amongst friends and at work can develop habits you never had i.e. coffee and biscuits at the office or couple of beers or wines in the evening after work rather than heading to the gym.
- A hectic lifestyle can create the habit of skipping meals, consuming convenience and fast foods.
- Your emotions such as stress and depression can create habits such as eating when you are not hungry (emotional eating).
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Tags: Diet, Eating Habits, Exercise
