Michelle Barber

Simple Fitness Habit: Week 1

What if dietary and fitness habits were made simple?  To find out if that’s possible, I signed up for Simple Fitness Habit from Leo Babuta of ZenHabits.

Simple Fitness Habit is a self-paced course.  I signed up for the Gold level so that I’d get four months of access to articles, accountability forums, tracking forms, and several bonuses like the Marathon Roadmap and Scott Dinsmore’s Live of Your Passions ebooks.  I’m especially looking forward to Dinsmore’s ebook, as well as the Kettlebell Barbell Hybrid Program and monthly expert webinars.

The program is made up of three modules:

• Creating Habits
• The Mindful Diet
• Fitness Plans

I’m really getting into the Creating Habits module and learning that an easy way to form a habit (healthy or unhealthy) is to make it extremely simple and to connect it o a trigger.  So I decided that I’ll drink a tall glass (14 oz) of water (the habit) immediately upon waking (the trigger).

I’ve been in the program for eight days and the water thing is going along smoothly.  However, I also chose to “do yoga every day, right after drinking the glass of water.”  I haven’t stuck to that one bit and I think it’s because I complicated things. First of all, I chose two new habits that would essentially happen at the same time or the same time of day.  Then I chose one of the brand new habits as the trigger for the other new habit.

I can now see the roots of many of my other habit-forming failures. 

So I’m simplifying even more.  I’m keeping the drink-water-in-the-morning habit.  My next habit change will be to drink/buy water to replace soda.  At work, it’s a bit of a break in the afternoon to pop over to the store and get snacks and drinks with colleagues.  It’s easily a source of 800 non-nutritive calories a day, but I’m just going to focus on the water part at this point.  So I’ll buy water instead of soda (the habit) when we head over to the bookstore (the trigger).

The Simple Fitness Habit program is interesting because it focuses – as a foundation – on habits.  Rather than mandating salads or running, there are simple articles on how habits are formed, how choices are made, and how we can simply and step-by-step rebuild our habits around fitness and diet.

I need to dive into the actual diet and fitness articles next, but I’ve enjoyed the psychological foundation this first week has provided.

Do you have a simple new habit you want to form?  Is there something you can tie it to so that your new habit is triggered?

And if you’d like to check out Simple Fitness Habit, visit the website and read more for yourself.