Habit change is hard. But why is changing habits so painful?
As a certified nutritionist and wellness coach my job is to persuade my clients to unshackle themselves from their bad habits and try on different healthier routines until their prior patterns lose their allure. But changing behaviors that are activated on autopilot often feels as arduous as climbing Mount Everest, and includes losing your footing and backsliding from time to time.
My Personal Struggles
I’ve recently been wrestling with shaking up some of my own health practices. For example, it finally dawned on me that I was not consuming enough calories when I took a good look in the mirror and noticed that my butt had gone missing. Also, I’d been avoiding dealing with my iron deficiency which I knew I’d caused by avoiding red meat like the plague since I was a child. There was no moral issue involved. I just don’t like to have to chew so thoroughly and don’t think blood on a dinner plate is a good look. Instead of addressing the cause, I’d taken the shortcut of an iron supplement.
While this was marinating in my brain, my exercise routine was abruptly upended by the closure of my cycling gym with a mere two weeks’ notice. I was forced to kiss my 5:30 am workout two miles from home goodbye, which had been a staple of my cardio routine for over four years. My resistance training also sorely needed a refresh but my limited imagination for building strength with anything other than free weights and machines had prevented it from happening.
In typical Lorie fashion, I decided to whip myself into a frenzy by overhauling everything in one fell swoop. Why not work through all the misery at once? The upshot was that I made myself miserable for about two months.
Ditching My Tried-and-True Workout Routine
Exercise turned out to be especially problematic. After failing to locate another spin studio near me with classes at the crack of dawn, I decided to sign up for group treadmill classes at STRIDE Fitness™, mainly because they offer early morning classes and it’s a 10 minute drive from home. I’m a jogger, so I hoped that it would not only be an enjoyable workout but also train me to run like the wind, or at least get my per mile time down to a single digit number.
I had to quit after 5 weeks. My downfall was the heart rate monitor display which brought out the competitive beast in me. I ended up injuring and then reinjuring my hamstring so severely that I could barely walk.
So that was a no-go. On to “Plan B”: buy a Peloton. That worked out better than I expected expect for the head trip when I discovered that I have the weakest legs on the planet and cannot get close to either the cadence or the recommended resistance. Perhaps that was a clue that my stale strength training circuit was not serving me well.
Finding a new resistance circuit proved to be a bit easier. After struggling on my own in the garage trying to devise an alternative lifting routine, I contacted an experienced personal trainer I’d known for years who had opened a gym for the over 40 bracket. I was hoping I could at least keep up with the more seasoned crowd.
I endured several awkward sessions with the trainer-owner and learned that my miniscule buttock and abs had been in snooze mode while my legs and arms had been carrying the laboring oar, which is not their role. That overuse was likely a contributor to my numerous injuries over the past few years. I forced myself to endure the humiliation of being taught how to stand up like a normal person and to walk without my strong quads doing all the work.
After the one-on-one personal corrections, I graduated to small group training. Until I get more accustomed to the exercises, I will continue to feel awkward and incompetent. I’m trying to focus on my newfound strength, the supportive atmosphere, and staying injury free.
Watching the Scale Increase and Eating Cows
For many years I’ve hopped on the scale first thing in the morning to avoid weight creep and the prospect of having to lose 5 lbs. at my advanced age. While I thought I’d been maintaining a consistent weight, evidently the number had been very slowly trending down.
I had to get my head around the idea that it was a good thing to see the scale going UP. I knew I had to eat more protein to speed recovery from my weight training classes and to pack on some muscle. I’ve slowly added a little more protein at meals and healthy snacks like Babybel cheese, roasted edamame, and pumpkin seeds.
I mustered my courage to try the beef thing to add more iron to my diet. This came with a fair amount of trepidation. First, I tried a frozen beef patty, 93/7 of course, and it tasted like shoe leather until I drowned it in Bolthouse Farms™ Blue Cheese dressing. The flavor of my favorite cheese made it palatable but I still felt like a dog endlessly gnawing on a chew toy.
Next up was to try to make something edible with ground beef. My favorite recipe source featured a healthy beef stir-fry with veggies in an Asian style sauce. Voila, that hit it out the park. Even my husband, who avoids red meat and is a picky “Mikey likes it” type, admitted that it was quite tasty. Red meat has been successfully added to our dinner menu once every two weeks. It’s a start and it didn’t kill me after all. I’m hoping the iron supplements can go by the wayside someday soon.
For a few weeks after my amped up calories and protein intake, the scale refused to budge. But finally it gave in and I started seeing higher numbers. Even though this is my goal it feels wrong, so I’m trying to focus on the fact that my pants are fitting better and the appropriate muscles are firing up as they should. My current dilemma is trying to figure out when to stop gaining and transition to weight maintenance mode.
The Homeostasis Devil
I often tell my clients that adjusting health habits is the hardest thing to do in our world today. Not only do all the signals point to fast-food and gargantuan portions, even our biology works at cross purposes.
Our bodies stay in balance through a process called homeostasis. But that programmed safeguard works against our best efforts to shake things up and make sustainable changes.
We sleep soundly when we cue ourselves with a consistent wind-down routine at the same time every night and get up at the same hour every day. The body does not make a physiological adjustment when Saturday rolls around. Our circadian rhythms are the key to this process. When we travel through different time zones, reentry brings disrupted sleep and we walk around like zombies for a day or two.
Another example of the body’s penchant for predictability is that my digestive system gets thrown for a loop every time I travel even when I haven’t done anything crazy like eating crickets or frog’s legs.
Research demonstrates that our bodies have a “set point,” which is what makes it so hard to lose weight and causes those frustrating plateaus. This manifests as a delayed reaction from the time we clean up our diet to the scale acknowledging our efforts.
Habit Change is Hard
My recent health journey has caused me quite a bit of consternation as well as a disquieting out of control feeling. I also experienced change fatigue due to having to trigger an army of brain cells to constantly monitor how I was moving my body and what I was putting in my mouth. Somedays the chore of identifying the elusive protein boost that would work for me and ferreting out a new exercise regimen left me feeling spent. I yearned to get those tasks out of my cognitive brain and back into autopilot where they belong.
One of the upsides of my personal struggle is that I feel increased empathy and respect for my brave clients who embark on health journeys with me and I better understand the amount of persistence that such a metamorphosis requires.
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