By Leo Babauta
We’re about a week into the Healthy Eating Habit module, and you now have some data you didn’t have at the beginning. Let’s take a look at what we can learn from it.
Here are some common outcomes, and what I recommend for each:
- Did great (6-7 successes in a week): You were pretty much perfect, and your habit went great. That means you picked a perfect habit to start with! Now pick another similarly easy habit that you can add to the first one. Make it so easy you don’t have any doubts of doing great.
- Did well (4-5 successes): You made some good progress but had a few misses. Celebrate your successes! And take note of what got in the way when you didn’t do the habit. What can you do differently this week? My recommendation for this week: Make your first habit even easier (so you’ll be sure to succeed), and if you can do that, you can also add a second super easy habit. If there’s no way to make your first habit so easy it’s guaranteed to succeed, don’t add a second habit. Just focus on getting better at the first.
- You struggled (3 or fewer successes): You’re probably feeling a bit guilty or bad about yourself for this, but actually it’s a cause for celebration too … because you learned something. What you learned is that the change you picked is too hard. Choose something easier: drink a glass of water every day, eat a fruit every morning, take a pause sometime during your dinner to see how you’re feeling. Something simple and doable. This is an adjustment that will help you do better this week.
If you’re an advanced healthy eater, I’d like to make a suggestion: try eating for purely non-emotional reasons. Don’t eat because you feel like it, because you’re stressed or bored or in a social situation. Make a plan of what to eat, and just eat according to the plan. This cuts out any emotional ties from eating. This requires an advanced degree of mindfulness, and also a flexible mind, because there will likely be days when you mess up, and you need to be able to flow with that instead of feeling bad about it.