Awaken Lifestyles with Olamide Balogun: Behaviour or Habit? Something must Change

Since my last article I hope you have done a S.W.O.T. analysis on yourself and your family. {Click here to read if you missed it}

You have discovered what your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats are. This should lead you among other things to a self discovery of why you want to lose weight. This is important because having a healthy lifestyle cannot only be achieved and sustained simply because you want to lose weight. This is obviously not sufficient or else everybody would lose weight and keep it off.

Key to weight loss is our habits. Changed habits lead to changed behavior, thereby a changed lifestyle.

I like definitions so we can be sure we are speaking about the same thing. The definition of behavior is the way in which people act in response to a particular situation or stimulus.

The definition of habit is a settled or regular tendency or practice, especially one that is hard to give up. I think we can conclude that behavior is made up of habits. So if you always bite your nails we can say your nail biting habits means you have a nervous disposition.

We live life in little habits that form our behavior that forms the outcome of our lives. There are good habits and bad habits. Good lifestyle habits keep us healthy, happy and slim. Bad habits do the opposite.

The truth is that many people don’t know what a good lifestyle habit is or is not.

A good way to start tackling a bad habit and changing your lifestyle is to paint a picture of what you consider to be the ideal. So, for example I was listening to a talk where someone gave an example of a lady’s picture.

So let’s call the person Sola. Sola’s picture showed her husband being proud of the way she looked, her being healthier, loving the way she looked in the mirror, having more physical stamina, being a model of healthy living for her children and finally her choices being pleasing to God. This may not resonate with you at all. What is your own picture? Sola wrote these things on a card she carried around with her. Anytime she was tempted or had cravings, she would bring out her card to remind herself why she should not succumb to her cravings or temptation.

You can only control your behavior by changing your bad habits to good ones, one at a time. If you are the sort that grazes throughout the day, eating without taking into consideration what you are eating, you may want to start by recording all you eat. This will in the first place make you realize exactly how much you are eating and when you are eating most during the day. This may give you an insight why you are eating at these particular time.

This is the S.W.O.T. analysis of what you eat. Uncovering why you eat will go a long way to managing change. (I will tell you why you must know the underlying cause of a habit, in order to replace it forever with a good habit).This will expose the good and bad habits you have around food. If you realize you drink a lot of soft drinks you can start to reduce the number gradually. I always recommend quitting such things cold turkey but I have also realized that not everybody can do this because our susceptibility levels vary from person to person.

Therefore if you drink five bottles of soft drink a day, begin to gradually reduce this number, setting yourself a target of two weeks or a month to replace all the drinks with water only. I used to drink five to eight bottles of soft drinks a day as an adult and I have not had any soft drinks in at least ten years. Permanent Change is possible. By the way, juice even freshly squeezed is only marginally better than soft drinks, and so just as evil in terms of weight gain. Fructose is the most fattening sugar. (I am sorry if this appears a little harsh).

Apparently when you succeed in changing even a little, celebrate by clapping for yourself or doing a little victory dance. This is what the habit scientists tell us.

Getting an accountability partner also helps some people succeed in changing their bad habits. This is someone who will hold you accountable for your actions or inaction.

Wikipedia says frequent and regular physical exercise boosts the immune system and helps prevent “diseases of affluence” such as cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and obesity. It may also help prevent stress and depression, increase quality of sleep and act as a non-pharmaceutical sleep aid to treat diseases such as insomnia, help promote or maintain positive self-esteem, improve mental health, maintain steady digestion and treat constipation and gas, regulate fertility health, and augment an individual’s sex appeal or body image, which has been found to be linked with higher levels of self-esteem.

Myth 2: Exercise makes you lose weight

If you do not adjust what you eat and you exercise you will look better than before but you will not lose any weight. You will just be that 20kilo suitcase that when it was packed by a child it looked bulky but when packed by a professional it looked very slim.

The take away from this article is that we must find out what our bad habits are, why we have them and start changing bad habits into good ones. Finally, exercise without good nutrition is a waste of time.

I have been giving you tips from the first article. Don’t wait for a prescription. Begin to make changes as you read through these articles. Let me know how you are doing or any questions you may have.