So you want to change your habits. Either start a new habit, or change a bad habit, but where do you find the TIME?
Do you need to wake up at 5 AM now? How about exercise for an hour per day?
When you think of changing your habits, it’s easy to have it set in your mind that change requires a lot of time. You may think that meal prep needs to be a three-hour ordeal every Sunday. It doesn’t.
I’m here to tell you that you don’t don’t need to wake up every day at 5 AM, you don’t need to block off half of your weekend to meal prep, and you definitely don’t even have to step foot in a grocery store these days. Instacart anyone?
The reason you aren’t doing these things in the first place is that they are too complicated to get started. That’s right, stop making things so damn difficult for yourself.
When I started changing my lifestyle to become healthier, I thought that I needed to take earth-shattering action all at once. I would devise a plan with ten various daily to-dos.
Old me:
- Wake up at 5 AM
- Fasted cardio
- Don’t eat until lunch
- Weigh out my food
- Only eat protein and veggies.
- Strength train for an hour
- Stop drinking alcohol
- Track my calories
- Make new friends
- Join a gym
- Burnout
- Rinse
- Repeat
Guess what happened after day one? Nada. My master plan actually backfired!
The issue that I was running into was not that I wasn’t motivated to change – I wanted nothing more to be different.
The problem was in the design.
The solution is to get TINY and make the habits easier by decreasing the amount of time. Yes, I want to help you make your life easier!
One Habit At A Time
When you want to change, it’s essential to start with only one habit. Contrary to what you may think, this one habit should be the easiest one.
Before you start huffing and puffing, remember this, you are already NOT doing it. So hear me out.
Pick one habit to change – Let’s go with waking up earlier.
Instead of aiming to be up at 5 AM, when you usually wake up at 8 AM, aim to wake up 15 minutes earlier (so 7:45 AM). If that is too much, then shrink it even further, five minutes earlier, or hell, even one minute earlier.
What about exercising daily?
Instead of blocking off 30 mins or an hour to work out, how about starting with one push-up after you get out of bed?
And batch cooking?
What if that could look like chopping vegetables for five minutes a day!
When We Start Small, Our Success Rate Becomes Higher
When we are successful at something, we generally want to keep going. When we suck at something is when generally when we give up.
Take Action:
- List out all of the time-consuming habits you want to implement.
- Pick the easiest one to get started with
- Shrink the time commitment way down
After all, with health and nutrition, change doesn’t happen overnight. It is the sum of the small improvements, or exceptions, we make daily that get us to where we’re going.
Even one minute a day is 30 minutes a month more.
Krista
PS. I’m officially at capacity right now and not taking clients at the moment. You can jump on my waitlist by applying to become a client here.