HABIT AND ENVIRONMENT — YOUR SECRET WEAPON IS YOURSELF I

When I start working with private clients, I tell them the first session will be an hour and a half instead of the usual hour. They understand this initial meeting is vital because it is when I will explain the foundations of the program, and walk them through the tools they will need to master in order to succeed. But that foundation, and these tools, are never what they are expecting. They show up expecting to hear about a food plan and exercise regime — basically assuming that I will tell them what to do and what to eat to lose the weight. Instead, I begin by explaining why that approach hasn't worked in the past, and why it won't work now. This chapter is my nod to that first client meeting. I want you to let go of your ideas about what a diet book should be and come at this with a fresh set of eyes and an open mind.

What if I told you that you are basically not present for over half of the health decisions you make in a day? That they are not really decisions at all? In fact, they are habits — habits so ingrained that you likely don't even know you have them. Uncovering these and triggering new, more conscious involvement in your choices is what will remove the barriers that have kept you from success. Target 100 is built on a set of holistic guidelines in six areas (nutrition, hydration, exercise, movement, stress, and sleep). These guidelines can be life changing. But without the engine of habit change behind them, they are just another set of rules that can't (and won't) be followed long term. Let me be very clear: Understanding and applying the formula for changing habits is the only way to achieve lasting weight loss. This is where — and why — most plans fail. There is lots of telling you what to do and very little explaining how to do it. The reassurance I find myself giving to clients — so often that it has become my catchphrase — is: You are not broken. People come to me bewildered and in despair, asking: "Why is it that I can accomplish so many other things in my life, but this one goal defeats me again and again?" It's not because they are "weak," it's because they've been using the wrong tools — imagine if you tried to pound a nail into the wall using a screwdriver! They've been using the wrong tools because for years they've been urged to fight the wrong enemy: the fight is not with food, it is with habits.

In this chapter, we will learn the formula for habit change, and in every chapter after this, we will apply it. It is the glue that will make this plan stick. The best part? You can use this simple formula to change more than just your weight or even your health — you can use it to change any behavior that isn't getting you what you want.

UNDERSTANDING HABITS

Habits affect more than just your health decisions: it has been estimated that up to 45 percent of everything we do in the course of a given day is habitual. So, what is a habit? As defined in Webster's Dictionary, a habit is "an acquired mode of behavior that has become nearly or completely involuntary." Have you ever driven a car only to arrive at your destination with no recollection of the drive itself? That is what is meant by "involuntary behavior." As hard as it is to believe, nearly half of what you do every single day is rote behavior that you repeat on a kind of autopilot, triggered by an assortment of emotional and sensory cues.

Take your morning routine. If you were to actually pay attention to the way you brush your teeth, you would notice that you do it almost exactly the same way each time. From the way you hold the toothbrush, to which side of your mouth you start on, to how you stand and spit and rinse, it is all perfectly choreographed. When you hop in the shower, you probably have a similarly predictable routine for how you wash and dry yourself. Most of the time I am totally unaware of what I am doing in the shower: my mind is elsewhere, on the day ahead or lost in other thoughts. My body mindlessly carries me through the motions. An interesting exercise is to take note of your own shower routine and then try to change one piece of it. For instance, I noticed that when I shower, I always shave my right leg before my left. Every time. When I decided to begin shaving my left leg first as an experiment, it was amazing how difficult it was. First off, I kept forgetting! I'd remember after I was already halfway done shaving my right leg. Then, on the days when I did remember, it just felt weird. There is really nothing more logical about starting with the right leg than with the left, but not to felt wrong somehow. I didn't like it; I wanted to go back to the "old way" I was comfortable with. And yet shaving is very different from habits involving food. There aren't biological, hormonal urges driving me, and there is certainly no guilt or shame wrapped up in the way I shower. Think about how much more difficult it might be to change habits entangled with those additional factors.

Your brain works hard to create habits so that you do not have to make the same decisions over and over again. For instance, what if you had to decide how to shave and how to brush your teeth each and every morning? You'd be wasting important decision-making energy you need for the more complex parts of your day, and so your brain tries to conserve that energy by relegating decisions like this to the realm of habit. This isn't just a metaphor: Our logical thinking takes place in the frontal cortex — your brain keeps that vital space from being tied up by shunting habitual actions to an entirely different part of the brain. This is a good thing! It is why you can think and perform other tasks at the same time.

Your habits are imprinted on your brain as neural shortcuts, and the more you habitually do something the stronger that pathway becomes. Think of it like a road: As you perform a habit over and over, the road gets smoother and wider, easier and more automatic to travel. This is why trying to simply "do things differently" via brute force is so seldom successful. To create a new, fledgling habit, it must be burned into a neural pathway; at first it will feel like driving over a rough dirt road, and your brain would always rather default to the well-worn path.

And yet we believe we can alter behaviors...