Change: One Step at a Time

Living Well

Written by: Meg Sharp, Fitness & Wellbeing Consultant, Cambridge Group of Clubs

Sometimes, at this particular time of year, we spend a little more time thinking about what we’d like to change or improve. About ourselves. About our lives.

This can be an extremely worthy, rewarding endeavor. Can be. It can also be an exercise in frustration and seemingly wasted energy that ends with a person feeling worse about themselves – and their life – than when they began.

We want your experience to be the former. I’d like to try and help.

I’ve written a lot on the topic of change. Of resolutions and failed attempts. Good grief, I have a graduate degree on the stuff. It remains a fascinating and heartbreaking topic to me. 

What I know to be true is this:

• We have a tendency to gravitate towards lofty goals.
• These goals are shiny and exciting and fill us with hope – a powerful emotion that fuels our initial attempts with vigor, and – under the right circumstances – can help pull us to the finish line.
• Sometimes – often? – we struggle to attain our goal. We underestimate how much time, effort, and patience is required. We don’t realize that transformation requires the creation, repetition, and augmentation of many new habits. Instead, we stare impatiently at our reflection and determine we didn’t have enough willpower, determination, skill, or whatever. We lose hope and give up. In the end, we just don’t have the time to pursue it anymore, right? I mean who has time to commit to something that isn’t working?
• Except maybe it was working? Or could have worked? Maybe the process needed a little – or a lot – of tweaking. Maybe you didn’t quite have the skills but could have learned them? With time, or with some help?

Let me see if I can explain better using a specific example. Because it seems to be a relatively common goal, I’m going to use weight loss. Let’s begin!

Step 1: State your goal: Weight loss.

Step 2: Be as specific as you can including timelines: I’d like to lose 25 pounds over the next 12 weeks.

Step 3: Determine WHY it matters (the more “WHYs” the merrier. It helps keep the hope alive!): I will feel more attractive. I will be healthier. It becomes harder to lose weight as people get older, and I’m 47 now – so this is a more effective time to tackle this than a decade from now. I worry about heart health. I’d like to set a better example for my kids.

Step 4: Start a list of the habits you plan to ADD in order to facilitate this change: We are built to favour abundance vs restriction. So, it’s helpful to focus on “adding” habits before you tackle “taking away”. Here’s what you might decide needs to happen in order to support your weight loss goal:

1. Change my diet.
2. Start exercising.

Science Segue: changing habits is periodically uncomfortable. Having the CONFIDENCE that you are making changes that will make a difference is vital. Are you confident you are making the appropriate changes? Get some advice. Hire an expert. 

For example, if you hired me or one of my esteemed colleagues for an hour or two, we would do a few things:

1. Measure your current body composition and let you know if your goal and timeline are realistic, or if they need to be tweaked a little.
2. Explain specific exercise and dietary changes that will have the most impact. Likely we would tell you to:

1. Eat and drink slowly. Put your cup down between sips and your fork down between bites.
2. Eat more vegetables and lean protein.
3. Move daily.
4. Add strength training to your routine twice a week. This will help maintain or even increase lean tissue which is key to keeping your metabolism high. Remember when you cut calories, your metabolism tends to drop. Making weight loss extremely hard. The strength training is important.
5. Prioritize your sleep. Lack of sleep encourages weight gain. If you are currently getting 6.5 hours a night, aim for 7. 

Now we’ll address point 4 properly. You have a list of habits you are going to embrace. As you develop the skills to make these habits permanently your own, you will need to add to/improve each habit and likely start to add more. For example:

1. Ensure you are getting 35-50 grams of lean protein at every meal.
2. Increase intensity of your strength training routine.
3. Add high intensity intervals to one of your cardio days.
4. Add 15-30 more minutes to your nightly sleep goal.

Science Segue: More than willpower, grit, or stick-to-itiveness, change requires SKILL. Do you have the skills required to make the appropriate changes? Ensure the habits are small, manageable enough that you will be successful. Remember you can start small because once you’ve nailed the habit, you improve/increase/add. Moreover, get help where you need it. Hire a personal trainer to develop and teach you the strength training and cardio routine that is best for YOU. Hire a nutritionist to help you determine the dietary changes that will have the most impact. These experts have SKILLS you may not possess, but can learn! Bonus points: once you’ve been taught a skill by an expert, your confidence grows in spades!

Step 5: Now that you’ve ADDED some habits, you likely need to TAKE-AWAY some habits. 

For example: 

1. Cut back on alcohol consumption. Alcoholic drinks are empty calories. As importantly, alcohol impacts the quality and quantity of your sleep. See point “e” on adding sleep.

Remember “start small and augment”? Here’s what this might look like:

1. Choose 2 nights a week when you consume zero alcohol. After 3 weeks, increase to 3 nights.
2. Restrict yourself to one or two of your favourite types of alcohol. When faced with variety, humans tend to consume more. If you love wine, make that your choice. Wine only. After three weeks, white wine only. 
3. Choose the hours between which you drink: 5:00pm and 9:00am, for example. After 3 weeks, make it 6:00pm - 9:00pm.
4. Let’s ADD a habit to make this even easier: between each alcoholic beverage, drink a glass of sparkling water.

Step 6: Look at your lists of habit ADDs and TAKE-AWAYs. List all the benefits these little changes are going to make. More importantly, as you undertake the new habits NOTICE and CELEBRATE all these changes:

1. The days I exercise my ability to handle stress is a lot better.
2. The evenings I abstain from drinking, I DO sleep better and I’m more patient the next morning.
3. I love how strength training makes me feel more confident in my own skin. I have better posture too.
4. Adding vegetables to my diet has made cooking dinner more interesting.
5. My kids have started eating more vegetables too!
6. When I take time to workout at noon, I actually get MORE work done than the days I don’t exercise.

Spoiler alert: Emphasizing the benefits of your new habits immediately reinforces them. This increases the likelihood you will continue to repeat them. This also means they start to take up more space in your brain: These little benefits become as important, if not more important, than that big, hairy, audacious goal you set weeks and weeks ago. Ultimately, you might find that whether or not you hit that goal doesn’t matter as much. Because you’ve gained so much along the way. AND, because you’re continuing to add, augment, and improve – your skills and your habits – perhaps you are moving, slowly and meaningfully – towards that ultimate goal. Either way, when you look at your reflection this time around – you see success.