Surprisingly...Unstuck: Rewire your brain to exercise more, eat right, and truly enjoy doing so - Maria Brilaki

Partial Excerpts (antilibrary)

2012

Foreword

It was 2010 when I realized that in the previous 2 years, while I was a graduate student at Stanford University, I had put on 12 pounds

was: “I want to live a long and vital life. I want to evolve into a grandma who does not get knocked down by her grandkids.”

I decided to change my lifestyle, to improve it. No, I didn’t want to lose weight. I felt ok being 12 pounds heavier than I had been. I looked fine. I was still average. But I did want to stop the bad trend that I had ignited

Two years later, I am eating vegetables daily, cooking at home, and consistently exercising 5 days a week. Oh, and I am 12 pounds lighter without having gone through a diet. Losing weight was a natural side-effect of living a healthier lifestyle.

No, you don’t have to suffer to make healthier living happen and to stick with it. You just need to be strategic. Stay with me and you’ll soon learn how.

This book is about transformation

Navigating through the chapters

In Part II we will discuss how much you should do to get the results you want and code those healthy habits in your brain.

Part III is your toolkit. This is where you’ll find the techniques you need to actually craft that healthy living strategy, ranging from making the best of your motivation to removing your barriers, or remembering to…pat yourself on the back for every small win, and many more

In Part IV you will cover habits that…require practice.

one of my readers, Jane Cummings, 59, from Florida, went from hating exercising for all of her life and never exercising…to making it a habit.

Still I committed to 5 minutes for a week at a time

The fallacy of “I need to try harder…”

Let me guess. Personal health is the one area of your life that you wish you had more success in, yet you have not managed to tackle it yet

Maybe you wish you were eating healthier: less junk food, fewer cravings, fewer emotional eating moments, more fruits and vegetables

What actually works

If you make jogging, or healthy eating, or anything you want, a habit, then the right behaviors will come about automatically, without you having to think about them.

The rivers in your brain

The more you repeat a certain behavior the stronger this neural pathway gets:   §     The more you satisfy your chocolate craving, the more you strengthen the respective neural pathway, and the more you reinforce your chocolate eating habit

the unconscious part of your brain is the habits lord! You cannot rationalize when it comes to habits.   Did the unconscious part of your brain agree with your well-thought-out resolution to eat carrots and become a gym junkie?   Not really.   If the boss does not approve the plan, then the plan does not get carried out. If you would like to live healthier, and yet you don’t, then the boss hasn’t approved your plan yet.

Short-term goals are under the reins of the executive mind and long-term goals are under the reins of the habitual mind (i.e., the boss).

Persuading the boss

To persuade the boss, we first need to understand how it works. What does it like?

Where do I start?

Scientists keep disagreeing on what we should eat or not, exercise standards keep changing

To be honest, I don’t know what exactly is healthy

However, there are some things that no one disagrees about… For example…   §     Eating vegetables is good for us, while eating a lot of desserts is bad. §     We need to move. It may be simply walking but we do need to get some activity in our lives.

Informed Radical Change

Radical change is hard.   Hmm…I am not sure how long you can last. It is almost designed to fail.

Informed radical change happens when you create a support system for yourself, before you actually embark on a change to healthier living. Thus, informed radical change is not solely dependent on motivation and willpower to sustain you.   What is the support system? You will learn all about it in the next part of this book.

Ridiculously small steps

Doing 2 stretches in the morning, every day

They take less than 30 seconds to complete. §     They require minimal effort.

Ridiculously small steps train your brain

Rocking the boat

All those people are success stories.   Countless other people were getting married, or wanted to exercise more, or improve their lab results, but never got started

They just succeeded by themselves. How?

In this chapter I am going to discuss what I call “the five multipliers”. The existence of these multipliers is already known. What they do is that they significantly advance your chances of success.

The five multipliers are:   §     A sense of urgency. §     A sense of belonging. §     Committing yourself by paying money. §     Committing yourself by being accountable. §     Doing something fun

Multipliers elevate your motivation levels and the quantity & quality of your triggers.

Yup, multipliers work. Let’s investigate them in more detail.

Urgency: The longer you do nothing, the harder it gets

Doing better than 90% of people

There are a few things that are going to distinguish you from 90% of people. I actually wanted to say 99%, but since I don’t want to appear too self-assured, I reduced that percentage to 90%.

While most people repeat the same mistakes over and over again… Getting unsatisfactory results again and again… Feeling disappointed… Feeling guilty… Blaming themselves… You can escape that route. Or, better said, you can learn to escape it more and more

Evidence vs. Platitudes

Most people tell themselves they will try harder “this time”, yet once again, they assume that motivation and willpower will carry them through

What platitudes do is that they oversimplify. Oversimplification is bad as it makes you think you understand the problem, when you actually don’t.

Platitudes can become psychological barriers

What approaches have you already tried?

What are you going to change so that you won’t get the same results as before?

Your capacity to experiment

If the plan fails, then people feel like a failure too. And along with that, their health and fitness level drops

Instead of thinking that “this is it” about any plan, see it the way it actually is: a plan that could possibly work or not. When you start on a new plan, you run an experiment.

If the plan does not work, then you don’t necessarily need to drop it. What you need to do is examine possible reasons that could be responsible for the failure of your plan, and then tweak the plan based on that examination. It’s time to experiment in a slightly different way than before.

deliberately acquiring a new habit is not trivial. This fact does not mean that you cannot improve your performance and that your plan is perfect. Yes, maybe you should change the time you work out to better suit your schedule. Or, make another tweak. Yet it does mean that being a little off is acceptable. You might just need more time.

However, let’s suppose that a full month has passed and you have only completed half of the month. You spent the second half of the month debating with yourself, trying to persuade yourself to follow your diet or workout plan, but you are still not complying with your decision. In this case, it is almost certain that your plan needs to change. The fact that you are skipping workouts or meals or whatever the step you chose was for two weeks is indeed an indication of a bad plan.

Maybe you don’t really want to do it? Maybe you don’t think you actually need to do it? Maybe your rational mind wants you to do it, but your heart is not convinced? Maybe it makes you feel overwhelmed?

The three most common suspects that cause plans to go wrong are:   §    Going for something because you “should” §    Going for changes that are too big, and §    Choosing triggers that are too weak.

The three easiest ways to change your plan are:   §    Looking into your feelings. Do you hate your own skin? You definitely need to pivot and wave Mrs. Judgment good-bye. §    Feel overwhelmed? Scale back with the change that you decided to take on, and/or §    Strengthen the trigger(s) you picked for it.

Your thoughts predict your results

Yeah I should probably do that...”

then I can tell you with 90% confidence that your plan is not a good match for you. Your heart is not really in it.

Experimenting vs. the perfect plan

If you approach your healthier living plan as an experiment, you will keep your objectivity. You will see reality as is, rather than perceive it in a funhouse mirror that skewers the truth

Failing to plan (for joy) is planning to fail

Don’t be strict. Actually, letting yourself indulge in what you consider a bad habit may help you stick to the rest of your living-right habits. Don’t forget to plan for joy!

For example, New York Times best-selling author Tim Ferriss advises a “cheat day” in his slow-carb diet, where very few carbs are allowed

When you create your healthier living strategy, you need to account for fun and…indulgence. A few options are…   §     You might use “reward substitution”. §     You may use a cheat day. §     You may choose to keep a bad habit but work on another.

Tom was ready to focus on the emotional eating “problem” when I told him that he could keep his emotional eating, make peace with it, at least for the time being, and just insert a little bit of exercise in his everyday life.

Plus, making consistent lifestyle changes is about celebration and enjoyment. Without joy there is no lasting habit

So if you want your new-habit building to work, you have to make it joyful. Or you have it easy so that your brain does not rebel.

take a deep breath, say “I love myself because I am just so cool/smart/funny”, and then go on and create your first draft of the masterpiece called “My healthier living plan”.   Oh, and I said “draft” because don’t forget…You are running an experiment here!

The truth is, it’s very rare to get your strategy right from the start. Trying your new plans will reveal truths about you that you have not, and probably could not have, recognized before

For example, you may decide to lose weight, and find out that your plan does not quite work. A possible reason could actually be that even though you think you should lose weight, you don’t actually want to lose weight.   Oops, it seems that you have picked a goal that does not speak to your heart. You certainly did not expect that.

What if you tried to exercise or eat better because of the added energy you feel? Change your “goal” and see what happens.

you have to start acting: No amount of thinking will help you make the right plan.

The “perfect plan” won’t fall from the sky. And you won’t find the answer in a book. To create a strategy that works for you, you have to study…you