Tag Archives: Habits

Small Change, Big Result (Because Habits Cascade)

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Still thinking about lifestyle change, and making an overall change in my life to having a healthy lifestyle, rather than just a few healthy habits. I will be lean, green, and mean.

It seems like a lot of habits cascade from other habits. One of my really bad habits is to pick up some food on the way home from work. I’ll stop at the taqueria and get a burrito, go to Uncle Vito’s for some heavy pasta, or get Thai takeout from King of Thai Noodle.

Not good for the health. It’s always too much food (that I eat all of anyway), and the way restaurants make their food so good is by extra helping of oil, cream, and cheese. Tasty, but not healthy.

It’s a bad habit, and is one I want to change.

Not so fast though, I realized that there are a lot of other habits I have to change to do this. Part of the reason I get take out a lot is that it is tasty, but another reason is that I don’t have much tasty food at home to make a good, healthy meal.

Another habit I need to change is to go to the grocery store often to get groceries. Makes a lot of sense. I also need to get to the farmers market on Saturday morning to get a nice bag of fruits and veggies for the week. Two new habits. Great!

Now I’m thinking about how these will fit in. One of the reasons I don’t go to the grocery store often is parking. It sucks in my neighborhood. If I move my truck, it can take a while to find a new parking spot. I never want to move my truck for just a few groceries.

Turns out that I head over to a friend’s house most Wednesday’s for our band practice. It is always more of a hang out and drink beer session than a serious band practice, but it is good fun, and it is a good time to spend time with one of my best friends. I can tack the grocery shopping on to that trip, when I’ll have to re-park my car anyway.

That was easy!

As for Saturday morning, it’s easy enough to head down to the Farmer’s Market, I just don’t think to do it. Just added a reminder in my phone for Saturday morning. That aughta do it.

Anyway, so I’m working backwards to figure out the habits that effect other habits, and addressing those. I may decide to make a habit of eating only healthy food, but if I don’t have the habit of going to buy healthy groceries often, then this isn’t really gonna stick.

The habits seem to cascade into the next, so I am working on addressing these high level habits. There are a few others that I know I can implement that will cascade down to the “end result” habits, bur I won’t bore you with the details.

This week’s posts are a week in progress, we’ll see where this takes me. Should be interesting.

Any high level habits that you can think to change?

Are You Happy With Your Lifestyle?

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I’ve been thinking a bit about lifestyle lately, how it effects behavior, and more importantly, how it effects efforts to change ourselves.

I’ve struggled throughout my life to maintain a healthy, athletic weight. I gain weight from the calories in the air, and it has been pretty tough for me to keep up an ongoing exercise plan.

I’ve done all the usual goal setting with rewards, plans, and so on, and I’ve even made this work for me. This stuff has gotten me in gear and gotten me results, but it hasn’t quite stuck though in a long term sense.

I had been trying to incorporate a bunch of habits into my life, but those habits haven’t seemed to create the overall change that I have been hoping for. I can get a new habit into my life, but I never removed the old habits that are counter productive.

The other day I was watching a video online, I can’t remember if it was Tony Robbins or Frank Kern (or if it was the video with both of them). Anyway, in this video, a visualization exercise was presented. The exercise was to imagine an average perfect day.

Kinda seems contradictory, to say average and perfect, I know. The idea is that if everything in my life were just right, the big three of health, wealth, and relationships were all squared away and how I wanted them, what would an average day in that life be like?

Anyway, like an idiot I closed my eyes and got to work figuring out what that life would be like. I’ll leave out the mansion in the hills and the Swedish bikini team from the vision, and just talk about the aspect of this vision that relates to health.

What I realized is that the the overall picture of this healthy life was very different from the way I live my life now. A lot of the components were the same, like jogging, triathlon training, healthy food and lots of fruits and veggies.

I noticed that this vision was as much defined by what I did do as much as by what I didn’t do. Certain bad habits of mine weren’t there. In this vision, I don’t get dinner from Uncle Vito’s Italian Food, don’t buy a fast, unhealthy lunch instead of bringing a good lunch with me to work, and don’t stay up so late that I don’t wake up and exercise.

In fact, I could describe my vision of a healthy life as much by what was included as with what wasn’t included. What I realized is that what I saw when I envisioned a healthy life was an overall healthy lifestyle.

The lifestyle I saw would naturally lead to a strong healthy body:

  • I wake up in the morning ready to exercise, and after a jog and workout I enjoy natural, wholesome fruits and foods that made me feel invigorated in a way that lasts throughout the day. I continue to eat good food throughout the day, and eat foods that are both good for me and delicious. I have alcohol in moderation, when I have any at all. I eat healthy foods because it makes me feel good, and get a restful night sleep anticipating waking up in the morning for a new, fresh day.

My approach to getting my health in gear has been to add habits into my current lifestyle, and I should have been focusing on changing my lifestyle. By changing my lifestyle, the results I want will fall in to place.

Lifestyle is the backdrop to our habits, the things we do every day. Overall lifestyle shapes and colors all of the habits that we do every day.

I am spending this week wrapping my head around changing one aspect of my lifestyle, that of exercise, health, diet, and well being. As I wrap my head around this, I’ll be sharing my thoughts on lifestyle change.

Why does this matter? Especially on a blog about dating women? Lifestyle, and changing it, applies as much to dating and being attractive as it does to health. The ideas that are gonna go into this discussion will carry over to a change in lifestyle that includes dating more, or being more flirtatious.

Lifestyle is lifestyle, and it effects everything we do. It may be one of the most important aspects that influences our habits and our ability to change those habits.

Anyhow, check back later in the week for more on this subject.

The hidden curse of American Freedom, and how to break free of it

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This is a Deacon Go America message. Happy Fourth.

Our Country is free. What are you gonna do with it?

We have an amazing amount of Freedom in America. We have the freedom to make of ourselves, and our lives, what we want. Do you want to be rich? Famous? Have a big house? Lots of women? Lots of fun?

You can do pretty much anything in America, as long as it doesn’t hurt others.

So why aren’t you?

There is a hidden curse in the American lifestyle, and that is the curse of comfort.

Comfort is a nasty critter, it sneaks up on us and grabs us, and we usually don’t even know it. This critter can make us content with what we have, and make us feel good enough with where we are in life.

Comfort kills dreams.

Comfort makes us content with good enough.

One of the blessings of America is that it provides for people who just want to be comfortable, and it provides well. There is nothing wrong with good enough. If it you are happy with good enough, you will live a good life.

I have a feeling though, that if you are content with good enough, you wouldn’t be reading this blog.

How comfortable are you with who you are and where you are in life?

I don’t mean this in a “good enough, smart enough, and gosh darn it people like me” sort of way. I mean this in the sense of how much you are used to being who and what you are.

It is possible to not like your job, but be comfortable with it. It’s possible to be comfortable with not having a lean, muscular body, even if you want something different.

It is possible to be unhappy with your relationships with women, but be comfortable with it.

The source of all comfort

The comfort we have in life is strongly linked to our routines and habits. Sticking to our habits is very comforting. When we do something outside of one of our habits, it is uncomfortable. When you walk into a coffee shop and see a spectacular woman in there, is it your habit or routine to walk up to her and flirt with her? For most people in this world, the answer is no, and for those people, it is very comfortable not to approach her.

The blessing of the freedom we have in America is that we are free to do things that we are not comfortable with. We have the freedom to break our habits, and change our routines. This is no small thing. This is a luxury, and one that we can afford because of all of the comforts that we have in America.

How to break the curse of comfort

How do we break our habits and change our routines?

This is one of those questions where the answer is simple, but not easy.

It is like asking how to lose weight. The answer is simple, exercise and take in less calories than you burn.

Changing your habits and routines is simple: Do different stuff.

That answer, however, does not describe how difficult it is. In reality, there are a whole bunch of reasons why it is hard to change our habits and routines. It takes effort and diligence, and most of all, it takes an awareness of when the comfort of a habit is sneaking up on us.

Remember, comfort is a nasty critter that will sneak up on you. Even when you have started to make changes and do things differently, that critter might find you and grab you again. Before you know it you are back to your old comfortable habits.

Start by paying attention to your habits

I’ll have more about identifying and changing habits and routines in the future, but for those of you that want to start doing something today, pay attention to your habits, and when you are comfortable.

Everything you decide to do, ask yourself if you are doing it because it is exciting, and pushing you forward in life, or if it is merely the comfortable thing to do.

God Bless America, because we can have the comforts of life, while pushing the boundaries of what makes us comfortable.

Happy Fourth of July everyone.