Habits and Their Importance in Weight Control

All of talk about habits, and even instinctively know how they influence us on a day to day basis, but we don't really understand how much, let alone understand how we can change existing habits or add new ones. Habits are key to lasting weight loss and also short term weight cuts. So why would I discuss some psychological tendencies before much of anything else?  I already told you the secret to MMA weight loss.  Weight loss is like learning to swim.  You have to start small before you can go big.  You don't swim the English channel the first time you drop into the water, and you don't cut weight like George St. Pierre the first time you try losing weight.  Besides, that's not the way to permanently keep weight off.

If you are looking to lose weight, then you are already overweight.  You are overweight because you have inadvertently learned some new habits.  You need to learn new habits.  Learning new habits is a matter of instilling new behavior patterns over a long enough time that the subconscious takes over.  That period of time is about 28 days (some people say it is a bit more).  How do you make yourself do that new thing for 28 days?  Psychological manipulation.

Now we use the psychological manipulation methods discussed in prior posts along with one more.  Charlie Munger calls this the "Lollapalooza Effect."  I wrote previously about three psychological tendencies.  If you were to bring all three of those together, and use them on yourself, you could, hopefully, create a Lollapalooza Effect on yourself, and help motivate yourself to power through those 28 days needed to create the habit.

I have just glossed over habits so far, but what are they?  habits are evolution's way of helping you multitask.  Imagine what would happen if you had to think about how to run, while also observing your environment, while communicating, and at the same time trying to tackle an opponent, or catch a ball, or hunt an animal.  You would not be very successful at any of them.  Habits allow the subconscious part of the brain to take over the simple actions while your conscious brain concentrates on the tactical procedures that require thought and reason.

For people that are overweight, eating is a habit.  Eating too much, eating without keeping track, eating the wrong things, and eating without knowing are all actions which are habitual and lead to overeating.  In addition, the lack of exercise is a habit.  Watching TV while knowing you need to be doing something else is a habit.  That means, in order to lose weight, we have two difficult tasks.  The first is changing existing habits, and the second is adding in new habits.

So, how do psychological manipulation and habits tie together?  Until the 28 days is finished, and your new routine becomes a habit, you need to use psychological manipulation to make yourself do the tasks you need to lose that weight.

If you search the web for habits, the title for this post, or something similar, will show up.  "28 Days Makes a Habit" means, you can expect that after doing an action for 28 days, that action will become a habit.

Examples:

• Going for walks at coffee break and lunch break, after 28 days, it becomes a habit
• Tracking your calories consumed and burned, after 28 days becomes a habit
• Being aware of what you eat, after 28 days becomes a habit

Habits are the cornerstone to weight loss. There are some tricky parts about forming good habits that make them difficult.  This is where you use the psychological influence tool set I promised I would describe in a future post.  To help understand that better, I suggest you look for a speech by Charlie Munger called "The Psychology of Human Misjudgement", or alternatively called "The 24 Standard Causes of Human Misjudgement."  In addition, you can read the book “Influence” by Robert Cialdini.  One other tactic is to use gamification as a tool to help induce habits.

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