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Weight Loss Exercise

Creating some 21 day habits



Experts say that it takes 21 days to create a habit. I do not even know if this is true but the one thing that I do know is that if you do something, anything for 21 days it becomes ingrained inside you.

Let’s take that idea and run with it here shall we? Today we are as we are, if I decide that I am going to become more positive (this would make my wife and coworkers crazy) then I would think in my head as much as I could all day everyday about my successes in the past and the things that are going well. This would change me from being pretty positive to excited as I would feel that there is nothing that I can not do.

Building Great 21 Day Habits

Creating some 21 day habitsAt the same time if someone wanted to become healthy and they started to jog everyday as a runner would they would be sore the second day, sore the third day, stronger the fourth day, and very powerful by the fifth day. The habit is being formed, by the 21st day this person would be areal runner putting in mile after mile a week. Often runners have trouble taking days off even when they know they have to because that cadence of exercise reminds them of who they are, the habit has already been formed.

There are really only three steps in creating new habits that will become ingrained within 21 days, and really probably more like 10 days, and these are the following:

1. Decide on the Change – This means that you are making the very concious decision that whatever you are doing starting now will be different than before. This may be big like deciding you will exercise daily, eating better, or giving up alcohol, or this could be something smaller like deciding to start the day with a glass of water, or giving up some inane TV show.

2. Make the change often – To ingrain a change you have to conciously make that change as many times as possible. Usually if it is gaining something this is easier but if it is losing something than it will be more difficult. For instance every single time you want a cigarette but decide against it you will be giving something up, but if everytime you want to go for a walk you just get up and walk around the building you work in then you will be making an easy concious decision that you are looking forward to.

3. Understand that this is YOU now – The final step is the acceptance that you have changed. I do not consider myself a smoker anymore because it has been 15 years or so. I also don’t feel lazy becasue I have proven enough times that I know it is not true.

You should make your habit like SMART goals as well to help you to be able to get them right. If you wanted to lose weight this 21 days to a habit is even a shorter time but it works the same way. If you decide to eat only fruit instead of candy then you struggle for about three days and then it is over and three weeks later you have some chocolate and it starts burning in your stomach and the sugar rush gives you a headache, the habit was formed already.

My Experience in Building Lasting Habits

Years ago when I quit smoking I just imagined myself as a non smoker and then I just quit, I had been unsuccessful at cutting back so I decided that cold turkey was my best chance. After a couple of days for struggles I was OK and I continued my working out then one day weeks later I realized that the habit was now that I looked at myself as being in good shape and that I was flushing those bad toxins of smoking, I had turned the corner.

So now it is up to you. What do you want to do now? Do you have any bad habits to reverse? Or some Good habits you would like to incorporate into your daily life? As I said earlier, the change is the tough part and as you go along creating habits is a 21 day process so three weeks from today you can make a difference in yourself that you can be proud of.

Categories
Weight Loss Exercise

Recap of the first six days


This is our first recap day. I am planning a few of these days as I know that some of the changes that you are making are tough and there is still more tough stuff coming to get you felling better and most of all getting healthier.

Whenever you make any kind of life changes there are a lot of tough times. There are days when everything seems to go right as well as days when nothing seems to click. The reason that this happens is that your attitude starting the day either tells you that YES you are moving ahead and the changes are great or NO everything was find before and the pain of the changes are not worth it. Hopefully to this point you are having more yes days than no days.

Our first day was just a subtle commitment to make changes without really know the impact that it would have in our everyday life except for the excitement that comes with changing for the better.

Our second day was adding more water to our diet and this I thought was a fairly easy start with a high impact result over the fairly short term.

Our third day was getting started doing cardio everyday. We did not go into any details on the cardio because the first most important exercise trait that you want yourself to get used to is some kind of movement. Just as long as you walk, dance, do yoga, run or bike you are doing great.

Day four was taking care of our meal sizes, far to often people eat to few meals and often to large to really give anyone the nutrition they need and giving anyone a great way to gain fat. Many meals are a great way to keep up energy and be more aware of the food you eat.

The fifth day was a day to learn how to stretch. After all that movement and cardio your muscles will be getting sore by this day and stretching is a great way to get the blood flowing to the fibers of your muscles to get rid of a day or two of extra muscle pain as well as giving you extra flexibility.

Day six is the first good nutrient day. Learning about carbohydrates is a great way to see how we eat when we are not conscious of what is an important kind of food. North Americans are really bad for eating a lot of sugars and then eating far to many carbs as well in each meal.

The next few days may be a little more difficult but I will try to keep a few easy days in as these changes are going to still be challenging. I am sure by this point that your new attitude and feelings are great. These 30 days are designed to give you not only a better feeling body but also a fantastic new outlook on life.