As I write this, it is early morning on New Years Day. A lot of you are still asleep, and some are just waking up and getting started on 2012. Millions of people will make resolutions to do things this year that are both good for them….and very hard to stay with. I’m going to make a few resolutions that can help you do the right thing, AND stay with your good habits.

One of the most important things I’m going to do is level with you about what it takes to build a strong healthy body that will be fun to live in for many more years. If you waste your time and money on things that will do little or nothing for you, all you will accomplish in 2012 is to get another year older.

Building a stronger and more healthy body really come about ONLY through proper eating and exercise. You have heard this before….but millions of people continue to believe that they can take a few pills (or a lot of pills) and some injections, and poof…they will drop years off their body. This is strictly pixy dust….

There are a huge number of scams out there that do a good job of selling you a day dream. The problem is that we all want to believe that a significant transformation can be achieved with little work….so that we can go on about our lives with none of our routines interrupted. We also want magic transformatons to occur without any pain. That is why pills and potions are so attractive.

With almost 80 million of us in the “boomer” generation, there is a huge market for almost anything that promises to help us regain some of our physical vitality. Unfortunately, an old saying applies here: “if it is too good to be true, it is too good to be true…”

There are a few things that can make a major difference in your life, but they don’t come without effort, and are not always easy to stick with. But…the good news is that these practices will actually do good things for you….not just raise your hopes, take your money, and leave you worse off than you were before.

My resolution for you is that if you follow this blog, I’ll tell you about a lot of things that can really improve your life without sticking it to your wallet. You can take decades off your body….but it will take resolve, focus, and discipline to do. I’ll tell you how to spot fake products, how to assess things that might actually be good for you, and tell you about things I have tried and researched. In short, I’ll do my best to help you make the right choices for you.

I’ll have things for sale on this site. If you buy them….great. If you don’t buy them but use the free advice to help you build a better life for you that is fantastic! Like singer Jodee Messina says, we all just get one “ride around the sun”. Let’s all make the most of it. I’ll do my best to help you make the most of your ride.

Richard
7:45 AM on New Years Day

Trying to make positive changes in your life is usually difficult.  The main reasons have to do with the fact that we have established bad habits that are almost “hard wired” into our brains.  We can change these, but only if we recognize what we are trying to do, and what tools and techniques we have available to us to make the changes.  Even then, it will not be easy.  However, is is both possible and desirable.

Our brains are hard wired to make us do things that provide short term comfort, but often at the expense of our long term welfare.  When we evolved in the wilds almost everything we did was linked to a short term response.  For example, if we found food, we had to eat it because the supply was always precarious.  When we saw something that we wanted, we took it because usually it was necessary for survival.  Our internal drives were linked up with our daily needs for survival.  We still have the same drives that we did 10,000 years ago, but our life circumstances are drastically different.  Now our drives actually work against our long term welfare.

In the primitive situation, there was no “long term”.  We had to eat “right now”.  We had to find fire wood “right now”.  We rarely dealt with any situation where the planning horizon was longer than a few days.  As we developed more dependable forms of subsistence, such as farming and tending animals, we still had no more than a seasonal view of the world, and everything was always scarce. 

In our current world we still have the drives to “eat now” drive and a host of others that work against our long term welfare.  We are dealing with non-conscious drives to do things such as eat, relax, and save our energy that had survival value in pre-historic times.  Now, these drives turn us into unhealthy people who have to deal with obesity, hypertension, heart disease, and a host of other conditions related to eating too much and exercising too little.

When you take the plunge with a new resolution to improve your life, what will happen at once is that you will be working directly counter to your non-conscious hard wired drives to eat and conserve energy.  You need to understand that when you begin restricting your caloric intake, your body will scream “your starving me”.  When you start working out, you non conscious mind will tell you that “you have to conserve energy, you might have to run away from a predator, or survive a famine”.    These are the internal forces that will constantly work on you to quit eating properly and stop exercising. 

Most of your non-conscious drives and habits can be re-directed by your conscious mind if you recognize that you have to do this.  When you begin any program designed to change your habits, your mind and body will constantly try to get you to stop doing the programs.  New programs may run counter to your conditioned habits, and will usually run counter to your primitive survival drives.  Your conscious mind is the best resource you have for battling those habits that are really bad for you in the long run. 

As in the previous post, you need to have a plan to give you any chance of succeeding at your resolutions.  You not only need a plan for your eating and your physical training, you need a plan to help you stay on the program and the diet.    

For example, you can get a good plan for both diet and exercise in my book A Guide to Getting Younger After 60.  If you follow the training and the nutrition guidance, you will be able to make major changes in the your physical body, and other parts of your life as well.  The book provides the plan for you to follow.  You also need to understand that once you are a few weeks into the program, your basic drives will begin to emerge that move you to do things that will be very bad for you in the long term. 

You must have a plan to deal with the forces that will end your diet, stop your physical training, and terminate your progress to any of your long term health goals.   90% of the time the subverting forces will come from your non-conscious mind and the primitive drives to eat constantly and conserve your energy for life threatening situations.   If you understand this, you have a better chance of succeeding with your long term goals (AKA: resolutions).

Your first line of defense (plan) is to decide what you are going to eat each week.  Once you make this plan, then you will find it is much easier to avoid eating anything that is put in front of you.  Without a plan, you are totally at the mercy of your own will power in any situation, and the lack of any strategic reason to eat or avoid any goodie you may encounter.  If you have never tried to do a weekly eating plan, give it a try, you may be shocked at how often you simply eat what happens to be handy.

Most serious resolutions involve a lot of long term commitment and working against your inner drives.  Those who succeed are most often those who have a plan on what to do, and then follow the plan!!!!   As any of you who have worked in an office know, it is really easy to make plan, but very tough to implement the plan.  Rest assured that if you make a plan, recognize that it will require your constant attention to make it work for you.

Richard Schuller

If there is one time of the year when people traditonally wreck their diets or fitness plans it is the end of the year holidays.  Food is everywhere, and the temptation to overeat and not do proper exercise is almost constant.  In the video I suggest a key method for countering the potential ravages of the holidays.  Check it out.

Richard Schuller

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