Are Your Automatic Responses Sabotaging Your Weight Loss?

We make all kinds of choices every single day without even thinking, from driving to work practically on autopilot to stumbling straight to the coffee pot before we are fully awake, but are your automatic responses sabotaging your weight loss?

I don’t know about you, but I am a creature of habit. I like to wake up to the same soothing alarm sound every morning, shuffle to the deck to take the dog outside, and read my morning devotional before I’m even fully awake.

At night, I brush my teeth, stretch, watch Gilmore Girls (such a guilty pleasure of mine!), and put my pillows in just the right position before turning off my light.

There are hundreds of things I do every single day on autopilot.

Our bodies like routine and they adapt to our habits, but not all of our habits are good for us.

How Automatic Responses Sabotage Your Weight Loss

It’s a good thing to sink into routines. We set them up for kids early on to give them structure, safety, and stability, and those same concepts still apply to us as adults!

Coming up with a good bedtime routine can take you from sleepless nights to rejuvenating rest and changing your morning routine can make even the very-not-a-morning-person (that’s me!) more energetic and chipper when they awake.

But, there are also routines that we sink into that sabotage your healthy life that we need to pay attention to.

They are usually things we slowly slip into over time, so little behavior changes turn into destructive habits.

And, keep in mind that most of these things are just fine if you do them occasionally or every once and a while, but when they become habits, instant responses to triggers that we don’t even think about anymore, they can wreak havoc on your health goals.

Here are a few bad habits you may have unintentionally slid into over the years:

• • ordering non-water drinks and dessert every time you go out to eat

• • eating (all of) the bread or chips & salsa just because the waiter set it on the table

• • sinking into your couch at the end of the day with a bag of chips or a pint of ice cream to eat while you watch TV

• • stopping by the donut table at church every Sunday

• • grabbing fast food on your way home from work

• • reaching for dessert as soon as dinner is over

• adding last-minute chips & candy bars to the conveyer belt of the checkout line every time you go to the grocery store

How to Change Your Automatic Habits

1.  Recognize the Triggers

Before you can make changes to any of those automatic behaviors and routines, you have to recognize that they are there. Take a good, hard look at the things you do regularly and try to find any habits that may be secretly sabotaging your success.

Question your habits.

Don’t keep doing something simply because it’s something you’ve always done.

If you are grabbing the bag of chips on your way to the TV every night purely out of habit, stop yourself. If you are eating a full dinner, chances are you aren’t hungry, but when you’re in the habit of eating then, your body might even try telling you that you are.

Challenge it. And move on to step two.

2. Replace the Behavior

Once you recognize a behavior you need to change, you need to replace it with something.

It isn’t as easy as just telling yourself to stop it.

That approach is rarely ever effective!

Instead, take that bad behavior away and replace it with something else.

You can even come up with a gradual habit shift to make it easier.

Instead of grabbing a bag of chips, get a bowl full of grapes to take with you to the couch. Then move on to bringing a crossword puzzle with you instead – it still keeps your hands busy, but it doesn’t involve you eating.

You can even grab a stick of gum if you still want to have that chewing feeling as you watch.

There are tons of different ways you can replace that behavior, as long as you are slowly shifting toward a healthier habit.

3. Repeat

And this is the most important step of all! The reason that behavior was a problem in the first place was that it was a regular part of your life.

It’s your normal that shapes your life, not your every-once-and-a-whiles.

Grabbing grapes instead of chips on one night is great, but that’s not enough to change that habit for good! It takes you making that same decision again and again and again to make a lasting difference.

It takes an average of 66 days to create a new habit, but remember that the number is just an average. It’s not a rule. It may be shorter or much (much) longer for you to change something in your life so don’t get stuck on the number.

Just stick with that new healthy habit of yours, day in and day out, even (and especially) when you don’t feel like it’s making a difference.

These things take time. There are no instant, overnight fixes when it comes to changing your health. But every single healthy habit you form is going to make a difference, so keep it up!

Next thing you know, your fried-food-loving, couch potato self will be craving quinoa & baby spinach and running 5ks (seriously….that’s pretty much my life story)!

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