30. Track Your Way to Success: Mastering Habit Trackers

Discover the transformative power of habit trackers in Episode 30 of 'Weight Loss Made Simple.' Dive into the science-backed strategies for forming and tracking healthy habits to achieve your weight loss goals. Learn practical tips for implementing habit trackers, setting achievable goals, and staying consistent on your wellness journey. Join us as we explore mindful planning, effective tracking methods, and strategies for overcoming perfectionism. Tune in now to unlock the secrets of successful habit formation and start your journey towards a healthier, happier you!

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This episode was produced by The Podcast Teacher.

Transcript

Welcome back to the podcast. I want to talk today about creating new habits. If you’re struggling to stick to a new healthy habit, I want to talk to you about how I use habit trackers, how I recommend my clients use them, and how I think they can be very transformative. There’s actually a lot of science between habit formation and tracking, and it’s all very positive, right? It’s this idea that if we’re starting something and we’re keeping a visual progress of it, it’s much more likely to be successful. Habits, new habits, are not easy to form. It seems like bad habits are very easy to form, and good habits are not easy. But it just takes a little bit of effort in the beginning when we’re trying to start a new habit. So, I want to preface the whole episode by saying, I don’t think you should try and start like 10 new habits at a time. I feel like this is sometimes what people get into trouble with at the beginning of the year; we want to change like 100 things, and then we don’t do any of them. I want you to pick one, maybe two things to work on for a month. So, I like to do one thing a month or maybe even take the whole quarter if it’s something that’s a little bit harder to implement. If it’s drinking a little bit more water, maybe we only need a month. If it’s, “I’m gonna start going to the gym,” or maybe we need three months, maybe we need a whole quarter to institute a new habit. Our automatic, we’ve talked about it, to put things on very easy automated. So, a new habit is like instead of taking the highway to work, we’re like with a machete hacking a new path, building a new road. It takes a lot of effort. So, in addition to tracking our habit, we’re probably gonna need some reminders. So, this is where we can set alarms on our phone. We can get a buddy to be like an accountability partner. We can put post around; all of those things can help remind us. We want to be very clear about what habit we are trying to implement, and we want to think about where that will best fit into our lives. Atomic Habits by James Clear is my favorite book, but he will tell you, whatever habit you’re trying to make, we need to make it easy and attractive. And if we can sort of piggyback onto something we’re already doing, it’s amazing, like it’ll be so much easier for us.

So, the habit I wanna talk about, so I can give you real examples, is walking more, so doing a little bit more mindful movement and having a step goal. Lots of habit trackers are just kind of like a check, yes or no, this all-or-nothing mentality. I do not find that very helpful. I find that there’s a lot of perfectionism in my clients. There’s a lot of if we’re not doing it, we’re not doing it at all. And so, that’s sort of the downside that I want you to be aware of with these habit trackers. None of these things are supposed to be all or nothing. With any new habit, we just wanna do it more times than not. So, if we like to get A’s in school, maybe we work on trying to get a B the first month and then an A. Or maybe a C, then a B, then an A. An A is not 100%, and A can be 90%, right? So, if we have a habit tracker and we’re trying to do something 10 times, we can still miss one and get an A. So, that’s as perfect as I need it to be because I like to get A’s too, right? But I don’t need to get 100%. I don’t need to go above and beyond. I just want, truly, to make a new habit. I just need to be passing, and it just needs to get a date, and a C is 60. That’s all I need, wanna do it more times than not. So, beware of the all-or-nothing.

So, the way I like to do my habit tracker, if I’m gonna use that, is I like to give myself ranges, and I’m pretty sure I’ve talked about this with the step goal. My step goal, if right now I’m not walking at all, and so I’m starting out my step goal at 6000 steps first. So, I’m not gonna go to 10,000 steps because I’m not walking at all. It’s too much. I’m not gonna get there. But maybe I set it at 6000, and then I’m gonna give myself a range, right? So, 6000 or more is like a plus, green light, amazing. Four thousand to 6000, or 5000 to 6000, is a pretty good job, right? So, maybe that gets a blue, and then I really wanna make sure I at least get 4000, so maybe 4000 or less. Maybe I get like a red or an orange. OK, visually, it’s easy to see at the end of the month if I’ve had more blues and greens than red. So, I like to have a range. I do like to use color as like everything that’s pretty good or go is sort of in the same color family, and then anything is like I just didn’t do it at all, is a different color family. So, that way, we’re getting that initial credit for doing a pretty good job, but visually, it’s counting just like if we had reached our goal.

There’s lots of different habit trackers, and there’s lots of ways to measure success. Different habit trackers, if you or someone that maybe works from home or has access to sort of paper being open, if you sit at a desk and you can have a journal or a calendar open, then I think that’s a great place to track. Your habit is on paper and something like that. So, either using a bullet journal that you make yourself if you want to be super creative or a planner that has places for habit trackers or even just a regular planner, and you can get like a sticker, the post, like the actual post company makes, have a tracker post so you can just put it on your calendar. So, if you are someone that uses paper, that’s where you want that. That’s a great way to do it. If you are not someone who uses paper, if you’re always on the go, if you’re generally on your phone, then maybe use a habit tracking app. So, much to think about. What is going to be easy to track? Tracking is not supposed to be another habit chore, right? We might need to set an alarm the first couple of days to get used to it, to get used to tracking. But it’s not supposed to be a second habit, OK? So, just make it as easy for yourself as you can. Find a habit tracker that goes with your lifestyle. If you’re in the car a lot, maybe you keep it in your car, right? If you’re someone who wakes up in the morning and takes a couple of minutes to get out of bed, maybe you keep it in your bedside table. If you like to spend a lot of time at the mirror getting ready in the morning, maybe you have it there. You see what I’m saying? Find something that works for you.

Decide what progress looks like for you when you’re starting your habit tracker. So, I gave the example of like giving yourself a grade. So, sometimes when my clients, I like to encourage them to make them a meal plan and then stick to their meal plan. Makes sense? So, plan your food ahead of time, that way we’re in a good headspace, and then stick to it. So, if we have seven days in between times that we talk and there’s three meals a day, that’s 21 meals. I never ask them to do 21 meals. I’ll also like, can we do 17? Can we do 18? Can we do 18 out of 21 that we follow? And then they can keep track, and then we can get a percentage, OK? So, just decide what feels good to you, what is gonna be success to you. With these habit trackers, is it gonna be more blues and greens? Is it gonna be a percentage? “I wanna make 18 out of 21 meals that I stick to.” Is it gonna be 51%? Is it gonna be, “I went to the gym”? But I didn’t like this month, I’m just driving to the gym to start that habit, and then I can check that off. We want our goals to be something that we can track. We want them to be measurable, right? I know I’ve told the story of when I used to set goals before I guess was trying to really accomplish anything. I would just say random things into the universe, like lose weight, and it was very ambiguous, and there was nothing to measure most of the time. I had weighed myself ahead of time. I remember specifically, when I was like save money, I never wrote down, what was my account to begin with? So, how did I know if I saved any money? We have to be able to measure these things. So, we went to a very specific goal. We want to be able to measure it, and then we want to figure out what success looks like for us, and then what’s the easiest way to track this goal? What’s the easiest way to track my progress, and how am I getting, like how am I starting this new habit? How’s it going? How can we be consistent? Again, we just need to make it as easy for ourselves as we can. If we’re always on our phone, get an app on your phone. If you’re somewhere where you can sort of look at your calendar all the time, do it there. I just don’t want it to be all or nothing, OK? I know for me, if I’m all or nothing, the minute I have like four reds in a row or something, that would be it. I’d be out and be done, and like forget it, this is making me feel bad, I don’t wanna do it anymore. So, if it was something where I can at least get like partial credit, but I’m gonna feel better, and I’m gonna keep doing it, these are those visual cues I was talking about with our jar. Visual cues are really helpful for our brain, and if you’re a visual learner like me, it’s like exponentially easier to do things if you’ve got some visual cue. And so, that’s again with these habit trackers, are there these visual cueing, and it’s also just about reminding ourselves we’re trying to do something here, right? These habit trackers are like helping us set the GPS for this plan that we’ve set except for ourselves.

We need to celebrate, right? So, if we hit our 18 out of 21, if we hit our blues and greens, what’s our reward gonna be? I give you all kinds of fun self-care rewards we can do, right? There’s lots of non-food rewards. What’s a nice reward? How can we celebrate? It’s again completing that loop, right? I did something good, I need a reward. And then reflecting and adjust. I was listening to a very interesting book. It was talking about when we go to reach for something, we’re actually adjusting our hand in space like so many times to reach down and pick up something that we need. So, even something as simple as like picking up a pen off the table that we’ve done 1 million times, we’re actually not doing it perfectly. Our brain is actually having to make these micro adjustments all the time. So, it’s not doing it perfect. And that’s what reflection is when we’re looking at these goals, right? So, if we do see our habit tracker, and we didn’t hit our 21 or 18 out of 21, how can I readjust? If we can’t even pick up a pen perfectly, look, a new habit’s not gonna be perfect, and that’s OK. But just like it’s no big deal for our brain to readjust our hand as it’s reaching for a pen, it’s no big deal to readjust our plan to make it easier the next week or the next month that we’re keeping track. So, if I didn’t hit my 18 out of 21, why? What was going on? Did I set up unrealistic expectations? Was my meal plan just not realistic for me? Was there a special occasion I didn’t really take into account when I was making my plan? What was happening there? If I didn’t get mostly blues and greens, what was going on? Is it that it’s like the middle of winter or rainy season, it’s really hard to walk, and maybe I need to pick a different exercise, I have an injury, I need to adjust what my expectation is. Did I set my goal at 20,000 steps today when I was walking and like I got sore and I didn’t wanna do it? So, it’s not a big deal if we don’t get to our A+ the first month. Just readjust. It’s an experiment to see what works for us. Maybe I thought I was gonna keep my journal open at work, and it was gonna be easy to have it track there, and then it turns out it wasn’t, so maybe I need to put it somewhere else for this week. Maybe it will be easier by my bedside table. Maybe it would be easier if I used an app. When we get down this all-or-nothing perfectionism, it’s just unhelpful, and we have much more likelihood of failure, which is really just us giving up. As long as we keep going, we haven’t failed, right? Just keep trying to experiment, and we can compassionate with ourselves, and we’re like, let’s just adjust. Let’s figure out a new way, let’s try something different, we’re gonna succeed because we’re just gonna keep going until we figure out what works for us.

So, if you ever tried a habit tracker, I would love to hear your experience with it. If you have tracked or sucked me too, but I would love for you to pick one habit to work on this month. Just for progress, not perfection, try and make it as easy on yourself as possible and just see what you’re capable of. I am positive you can surprise yourself. All right, until next week, bye.