How to Make Your New Healthy Lifestyle a Habit

Over the course of this guide we have hopefully provided you with all of the information you need to move forward with your new look lifestyle. At least, from a mindset perspective.

Unfortunately, there is a problem to this. A lot of you will take on this advice and move forward – for the short term. It’s easy to do something once, but making it a habit is the most difficult thing and the thing that can quite often prove to be a stumbling block.

Even if you are able to make your new routine a habit, not reverting to old habits is also something difficult. It’s for this reason that we have covered both topics through this chapter, which will hopefully allow your new look regime to stay in place for the long-term.

Overcoming bad habits

Before you create your new, good habits, you need to eradicate the bad ones. These are the obstacles that are getting in the way of you making your way to those brand new, positive habits.

Unfortunately, we’re not in a position to identify everyone’s bad habits – they will vary considerably. What we do know is that something that hinders a lot of people is the ability to wake up in a morning, and kick-start their day with a gym session.

It’s for this reason that we will hone in on this example through the course of this section.

So, what is the reason we have the bad habit of not getting up early enough in the morning? You’ve got to convince yourself to get up, turn off your alarm, get changed, grab your things and go out. Suffice to say, this is too much hard work for most of us in a morning.

Bearing this in mind, how can we navigate these steps and make the process more seamless? A more seamless process is effectively a better habit, and decreases the risk of you not getting up and getting that workout under your belt.

Some people might find it drastic, but one of the best things you can do is to sleep in your gym clothes – just so that you are ready to go immediately after waking up. If this is too much for you, at least place them next to your bed, so you can effectively slide into them.

What about the alarm clock issue? As we commented on in an earlier chapter, having this next to you isn’t going to do much for your willpower. However, if you can place it outside of your room, you have to get out of your bed and that’s another couple of steps ticked off.

Finally, just pack your gym back the night before and place it right next to the door. It means that you can go from snoozing to traveling to the gym in a matter of minutes – and you’ll be amazed at what this does in relation to your hit ratio for actually making it to your workout through the course of the year.

Of course, we’ve honed in on the getting up in the morning example, but there are umpteen out there. If it has become apparent that eating badly is your problem, cooking in bulk can eradicate all of the obstacles that get in the way of this bad habit. If you can cook several meals at the weekend, it immediately means that you don’t have to concern yourself with healthy cooking during the week.

How to stop reverting to those bad habits

As you can see, overcoming these bad habits is actually quite simple theoretically. They are effectively life hacks, but a lot of people start to experience problems when it comes to keeping up with this new lifestyle.

As such, we need to create a system that ensures we don’t revert back to these hold habits. In other words, we are this time creating the obstacles, so we don’t return to the old ways that have caused this unhealthy lifestyle.

Just like the previous section, this is also remarkably simple. Let’s take watching excessive television as a prime example. If this is getting in the way of your progress, and wreaking havoc with your priorities, it’s time to put your television a long way out of reach (like in a cupboard).

Suddenly, you have to get the TV out, plug it in and organize it just to watch your daily dose. Suffice to say it’s a lot of work and most of us will give up and attempt another task (result!).

The above example can be applied to so many other issues. For example, if sweet snacks are your problem, simply locking these out of reach can work wonders. In fact, if you want to go a step further, just don’t buy them. Then, you actually have to visit the shop to restock and fuel your habit.

Technology is something that can come to your assistance as well, particularly if social media is your pitfall. There are apps out there that will stop you using certain websites at specified periods of the day, meaning that you can’t “check” Facebook for an hour, and you can achieve something completely productive instead.

This is the cherry on the cake, so to speak, of everything we have covered through this guide. Sure, you can implement something “today”, but it’s what you do in the long-term that counts. Keeping on top of your habits is the sure-fire way to do this and the way you can train your mindset to focus completely on your fitness journey.