If you are like most people, at the end of the holiday season, you make some New Year’s Resolutions with the idea of improving your life.  If you are like most people, these resolutions almost never survive the first two weeks of the new year.   You may resolve to get in shape, lose weight, and start doing things to improve your quality of life.  Unfortunately, these great ideas never seem to make any difference about how you actually behave.  A lot of serious research in psychology and brain science gives an insight as to why this happens.

First of all, if you have a “bad habit”, recognize that it is a pattern of behavior that has been built into an almost automatic response in your brain.  You have done it over and over so many times that the pattern is really well established.  Suppose that you have a habit of eating ice cream after dinner on most nights.  If you have done this for a long time (weeks-months-years), your brain will tell you that you “need” ice cream after dinner every time you finish dinner.   This message will come through even if you have eaten a lot of food before.  You have established a habit in your brain that will keep working on auto pilot.

If you want to break this habit, you will first have to establish what you are going to do that is different.  That is the easy part.  This is the “resolution”.  You may say that “I’m going to drink water after dinner, and nothing else”.  That is a nice statement of intent.   Now comes the hard part.  If you have established this habit over a long period of time, don’t expect it to go away just because you decided not to do it.  Your brain will automatically tell you that you “need” ice cream every time you finish dinner…perhaps for months after you quit actually doing it. 

The problem comes because you are not only trying to break an old habit, you are trying to establish a new habit.  Establishing a new habit will take a lot of repetition….perhaps weeks, before it becomes “second nature”.  Even then you will not have gotten rid of the old habit in your brain….you will simply not use it very often.  Eventually, it will decay and be replaced by the new habit.  But…the bad news is…getting rid of your old response will take weeks or months.  In some cases it will take years.

If you ever wondered how some people actually succeed at breaking bad habits, there are some tools that you can use that will give you a better chance to succeed.  The first of these tools is to have a plan.  This plan will include what you are going to do instead of the bad habit, and what you are going to do when the little inner voice starts begging you to do just what you said you did NOT want to do. 

It is very important to recognize that your plan and your good intentions are all part of your consciousmind.  Here is where you use logic, analyze things, and calculate.  Your habits are part of your non-conscious mind.   In the non-conscious mind, things just happen. When you encounter a stimulus, you respond automatically without any conscious thought.  Your “habits” are largely part of your non-conscious mind.  The only way to defeat them is to use your conscious mind to make changes in your habitual patterns.  This is where plans come in, and where your ability to comprehend why you want to do things that are not good for you.

First of all, in the example above, you have decided to drink a glass of water after your meal instead of  having ice cream.  This is a good idea.  You also need to have a plan to deal with the urge that you will feel to “just have ice cream this one time”.   In short, you need to have a plan to confront the unwanted urge directly, and also have a plan for battling the urge when it appears in some other form. 

For example, let’s say you have had a really tough day, and you come home to watch television and you find that your favorite program has been pre-empted by a political fund raiser.  You want to kill the person who sold the air time for this, because you really wanted to watch your program.   When you are not feeling good, no matter how minor the aggravation, the urges to “compensate” for your “loss” will quickly be running through your head.  The thought that “I deserve something because Channel 10 decided to put on the wrong program” will be front and center in your thoughts.  You had better be prepared for the onslaught of these feelings, because they will be coming thick and fast if you have been keeping to your resolution for a week or two.  

I’ll make up a good ending to this story: the person who didn’t get to see their favorite TV program did not eat three scoops of Mocha Almond Fudge.  They instituted their plan to interdict the urge to mess up their fitness program.  They dropped to the floor and did 20 push ups.  Isn’t this a better response to the urge to stuff their face because they could not watch some “mind candy” on the tube?

Moral of the story.  As you make your resolutions, immediately make plans to deal with the urges that will come when you try to stick with your new regimen.  In the next posting, I’ll cover some more things that will help you stick to your program.

Richard Schuller

Part of a good anti-aging program is losing unwanted fat. Here are five quick tips you can use to begin shedding the dreaded “table muscle” and start looking more like a tiger instead of a marshmallow.

The key to these suggestions is that a lot of little things add up to a big thing. Any one of these suggestions taken alone makes a modest impact on your caloric intake or burn during the week. However, the impact of all of these over a week’s time will be to drop a pound of fat…or more.

1. Eat dark green vegetables every day. The dark green veggies are the ones that are loaded with vitamins, anti-oxidants and a lot of minerals you need to be strong and healthy. Iceberg lettuce is NOT a dark green veggie…it is mainly wasted space. Broccoli, kale, spinach, Brussels sprouts, green beans, and peas are some of the most common ones you need to eat.

2. Skip the salad dressing. Your good selection of veggies can be completely undercut by loading them up with salad dressing. Unless the dressing is NO cal (NOT “low cal”) you can be loading 150-300 calories of mainly fat to your meal. Get used to enjoying the taste of the vegetables. Don’t turn a good salad into a serving of “fat with lettuce”.

3. Drink black coffee instead of latte’s or frappe’s. The sugar and fat content of the exotic coffee drinks is really mind boggling. You can get up to 700 calories of fat and sugar in a large mocha latte’. That is more than you should eat in most meals if you are a man 5′ 10″ tall. Stick to black coffee. You will be surprised how good it tastes…especially if you are feeling smug about doing something that is good for you.

4. Walk as much as is reasonable during your normal day Most of us drive everywhere because cities and towns are laid out in ways that make it nearly impossible to get anything done without driving everywhere. Use the opportunities you have to walk during the day, and you can burn an extra 200-400 calories in a productive manner. Take the stairs instead of the escalator or elevator (obviously less practical if you work in New York City as opposed to Bend, Oregon). Just enjoy the opportunity to do a little good work for the body.

5. Don’t eat anything while you watch television or movies. Many people gobble huge amounts of junk while they sit and watch tv. If you go to the movies, it looks like most everyone chews on huge tubs of popcorn and other fat and sugar loaded “treats”. Just pass it up. You are probably not hungry, and all it will do is add more inches to your waist line. Feel smug about not gobbling and guzzling while being entertained.

If you follow these five tips for two weeks, you may be stunned when you add up the calories you did NOT eat. The simple addition of walking a little more will be significant when you think about how much extra work you did over a two week period.

Success in becoming younger and stronger comes in part through making a lot of small changes that add up to a big overall impact.