If you listen to most fitness gurus or health practitioners, they’ll tell you that weight loss is “simple”.

Weight management is a basic equation – energy output must exceed energy consumed as food to achieve weight loss.

This is an incontrovertible fact that sounds so simple.

Yes, there are other factors that influence obesity such as genetics, pre-existing conditions and socio-economic factors.

But ultimately, your ability to be at a healthy weight comes down to energy balance.

So why do so many of us struggle with managing our weight if it’s as simple as calories in, calories out?

Well who knew it, but human behaviour is COMPLEX. Our behaviours are influenced by the views we formed in childhood, our unique perspective, self-esteem, motivation and readiness to change.

People who seem to have their weight under control with relative ease have spent years, consciously or unconsciously, building the habits and behaviours that support a healthy lifestyle.

In other words, their daily habits set them up to behave in such a way that their energy output is greater or equal to their energy input.

Often we’re tempted to start big when it comes to making behavioural changes. Motivation is often high at the beginning of a health resolution, and that can sustain us for a short amount of time when it comes to big changes like cutting out carbs or committing to daily HIIT workouts.

What happens when the motivational drive fizzles out after a few days, weeks or months?
What if old habits creep in without you even noticing?
What if the big change you made is not sustainable long term?
What if you are just swapping out previous unhealthy habits with newer unhealthy habits?

Establishing healthy daily habits is the key to effortlessly managing your weight

“The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.”
― Samuel Johnson

Habits are impulsive. They don’t require intention and are initiated subconsciously, often triggered by external cues or stimuli. For example, coming home after a long day and reaching for a packet of chips because that’s what you always do, having a cookie or three with your afternoon cuppa or, munching snacks while watching television.

Less healthy habits are going to take some effort to disassemble. But when we break the habit cycle and replace with a new, more favourable behaviour in response to an external cue, soon the new habit will become effortless.

So, using our above example, a healthier response to arriving home after a long day might be immediately changing into comfy clothes and going for a five minute stroll with the dog.

Over time, this habit shift could make all the difference between gaining weight and slowly but sustainably shedding excess fat.

How can I erase a habit?

Technically you cannot completely delete a habit. Habits can stay dormant for a very long time but are never completely erased. However, the good news is that the brain can be rewired to respond to the stimuli or cues differently with practise and these key strategies:

1. Be self-aware and mindful

The first step to override a habit is becoming aware of your habits in a non-judgemental manner. Practise daily mindfulness to identify your own habits and the context cues that will trigger a habitual behaviour. The easiest way to do this is to keep a little diary of what you do each day and look for patterns.

Context cues are situational. They can be a specific location or time, presence of particular people, internal sensory sensations (tired, hungry, sleepy, irritable), external sensory sensations (feeling hot or cold) or internal cognitions (mood, low self-efficacy/self-esteem).

Here are some examples of some habitual behaviours:

• Orrder Uber Eats after a long stressful day
• Have a piece of chocolate after dinner
• Skip my daily walk if it’s later than 6:22pm

In these examples, the cues such as “long stressful day” and “time” lead to the behaviour of ‘‘skip walk”, “eat a piece of chocolate” or “order Uber Eats”.

In his book Atomic Habits, James Clear suggests writing down the cues and current habits to become aware of them. Remember – don’t be judgmental! Ascertain one habit at a time that you would like to change to achieve your weight loss goal.

Building a new habit is a process. It requires repetition, consistent exposure or removal of context cues and automaticity.

2. Find your motivation

A habit is repeated if there is a conscious motive to perform a behaviour or when a desired outcome is expected. Discover what motivates you. Important questions to ask yourself are:

• How important is it to achieve your weight loss goal?
• What influence will it have on you and your loved ones?
• How does performing or not performing this behaviour impact your future weight loss goal?
• What personal values are affected by the current behaviour?

3. Intention not emotion

Once you’ve determined the triggers and the behaviour they elicit, you can begin the work towards changing the habits or eliminating the triggers that cause impulse-driven responses. You’ll need self-control, rational decision making and action planning to build or change a new habit. Rather than an all-or-nothing approach, making a small change at a time is most important for behaviour change longevity.

In his book The Power of Habit, Duhigg writes that a habit has three parts: the cue, the reward and the routine.

Next time you feel the urge to demolish a large pizza or skip the afternoon walk ask yourself:

• What are you feeling?
• Who are you with?
• Where are you?
• What time is it?
• What did you just do?

Answers to these questions are the cues to your habit.

The rewards satisfy urges. Identify the kind of reward that you seek; is it nutritional, psycho-social, emotional or an impulse gratification?

Repetitive nature of the cue-reward for the habit loop forms the routine.

4. Break the unhealthy habit loop

Old habits compete for time, attention and location where new habits need to occur. Once you have identified the cue and the associated reward, insert a new routine. Here are some tips to break the loop and insert a new routine:

• Change or remove current cues. This may require changes in time, location or schedule of events including a change in social interaction patterns.
• Recognise the urges or cravings and pre-empt cognition, emotions and activities that can lead to emotional cues. For example, if you have a big workday, plan ahead for anything that may cause you to deviate from the action plan.
• Develop self-regulatory vigilance. Track your behaviour and have an implementation intention strategy in place. Print your implementation strategy and put it somewhere you can see it. For example: When (insert cue) I will (insert desired behaviour).
• Substitute current reward with a healthy alternative or insert a new behaviour that will lead to new healthy rewards.
• Reducing the amount and frequency of the reward is also an effective way to gradually break habit loops.
  Get an accountability partner to watch your behaviour and inform you in case you deviate.

5. Build a new healthy habit loop

Constant cueing is required for behaviours to occur without the exhaustion of constant decision making. Use the environment to nudge you in the right direction by making the cue a big part of your environment. An example is to replace cookies on the counter with fresh fruit.

• Build current habits on existing habits. Identify current habits that you already do and construct new behaviour on top of it. Here are some examples: After I change out of my work clothes, I will pick up the dog lead. I will do a wall squat hold while I brush my teeth.
• Make the new habit attractive and easy to do like pairing an action that you need to do with an action you already enjoy doing.
• Keep track of your habit streak. It is rewarding and provides achievement gratification. Progress is motivating. If you have no way of noticing that you are moving forward it is easy to lose motivation. Tracking change can be as easy as a printed tick box chart.

Keystone habits have a ripple effect. Even a single small habit change may influence self-regulation of other unhealthy habits such as sedentary, nutritional and cognitive/emotional behaviour. Shape your healthy behaviour around your interests. Choose a keystone habit that is best for you and not because it is popular on social media.

If there’s one investment in your health that gives you the biggest bang for buck, it’s improving your sleep.

It’s always our approach with clients to snatch the low-hanging fruit first.

Get the simple, high impact basics right first, before you start fussing over macro breakdowns and what muscle groups to train on what days.

Changing your sleep if you’re not getting enough one of the most effective shifts you can make.

Get your sleep right, and you improve everything. Just changing this one pillar of your health has a huge flow-on effect for just about everything, from stress management, to productivity and even body composition.

Sleep is recovery.

Recovery is essential to muddle through the mental and physical exhaustion that we accrue during our extended workday. Sleep plays a vital role in our development and recovery.

So how much is enough sleep, and how do you get more of it?

The National sleep foundation recommends 7-9 hours sleep for adults up to 65 years old and 7-8 hours if you’re over 65.

Your overall night of sleep is made up of several sleep cycles consisting of four sleep stages. You may go through four to six sleep cycles on a typical night, with each cycle lasting about 90 minutes. Sleep cycles can vary each night for everyone.

Each stage is important for better physical health, physiological and cognitive function. By sorting and filtering memories, the sleep stages prepare the brain for learning new information the next day and cope with different experiences in the future.

Here’s a summary of what happens in each stage of sleep (and they’re ALL important)

Stage 1
This is the ‘dozing off’ stage, as the changes in your brain prepare you to fall asleep. You only spend 1-5 minutes in this stage.

Stage 2
Muscles relax and your body temperature drops, while brain activity, heart rate and breathing slow down in this stage. As the night unfolds, each sleep cycle has a longer stage 2. Almost half of the total sleep time is spent in stage 2.

Stage 3
Your body relaxes even more and you’re in deep sleep. During this phase, restoration and recovery occurs. Deep sleep is associated with creativity, insightful thinking and memory consolidation. Typically, deep sleep lasts for 20-40 minutes in a cycle and gets shorter in each cycle during the night.

REM sleep
Brain activity picks up almost as if you are awake. REM sleep is crucial for important cognitive functions such as memory building, creativity and learning. Vivid dreams are common during this phase. REM sleep makes up 25% of your total sleep time.

Good sleep helps you recover and re-energise

During the deep sleep phase is integral to repair, human growth hormone is released, and this is essential to adaptation and recovery at a cellular level. A good night’s sleep can also reduce your perception of exertion and fatigue the following day, so that you feel more energetic and productive.

Sleep makes you smarter and happier

A good, deep sleep also helps you consolidate any new skills and knowledge you acquire during the day. This helps your learning process and assists your brain to develop new pathways.

Quality sleep can help improve mental awareness and alertness, cognitive function, and mood. Every parent knows that a poor night’s sleep makes for a cranky kid the next day. Adults are no different! Good sleep is the ultimate mood booster and helps you cope emotionally with the ups and downs of daily life.

Sleep helps you train harder

An important benefit of the interactions between the physiological mechanisms that only happen while you sleep is enhanced training performance that helps you achieve goals like lift more, run faster and build endurance.

Sleep is protective against disease

Quality shut eye also promotes cardiovascular health via the breathing and heart rate changes observed as you progress through the stages of sleep. Additionally, the specialised immune markers called cytokines released while you sleep play an important role in fighting off infections and keeping you healthy.

On the flipside, lack of sleep and tossing and turning increases the risk of type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, depression and other medical concerns. Poor sleep also has negative repercussions on cognition such as an impaired ability to focus and make safe decisions in your own best interest the following day.

Having a hard time falling asleep?

The body regulates sleep by two vital systems:the sleep-wake drive and circadian alerting system.

The sleep-wake drive is the balance between awake time and sleep time. In simple terms, the longer you’re awake, the more you feel the need to sleep.

Circadian rhythm is your body’s biological clock and is regulated by exposure to sunlight.

These complex processes are intricately managed by several parts of your brain including the hypothalamus, thalamus, pineal gland, amygdala, brain stem and cerebral cortex.

Your sleep can be influenced by a wide range of external factors such as light, noise, and temperature.

Try these sleep hygiene tips to help you sleep better

Make sleep your priority

Aim for a set bedtime and ensure you’re ready for bed around that time every night, including weekends. This means no more bedtime procrastination. Avoid time-sucking culprits like Netflix binges or instagram scrolling!

Build a routine and keep it consistent

Budget 20-30 minutes to wind-down. For example, you might brush your teeth, put on your PJs, pick up a book, listen to pre-bedtime music, and do some light stretching or meditation – anything that helps you calm down.

Put away the electronic devices at least 30 minutes before bedtime to cut out blue light exposure. Blue light alters your circadian rhythm and suppresses melatonin, a hormone that signals the brain to sleep.

Create a sleep environment

The ideal room temperature for sleep is cool yet comfortable. Dim the lights and close the curtains to block out street light. Make your bed a sanctuary by choosing a supportive and comfortable mattress and pillows, and indulge in quality bedding you love.

Get sunlight exposure

Spend some time outdoors. Sunlight exposure during the day, particularly before 10am, helps regulate your body’s circadian rhythm that helps with sleep. Be sun-safe and pick a time when UV rays aren’t at their peak by avoiding exposure in the middle of the day.

Physical activity and nutrition

Regular exercise ensures good sleep. Reduce alcohol consumption and avoid large meals closer to bedtime. We also recommend you limit your coffees to before midday because an afternoon caffeine hit can also keep you up at night.

Aim for small changes as you incorporate these daily routines and habits to help you optimise your sleep quality.

Sleep Well!

Whether you stayed active during the restriction period or not, returning to exercise will feel foreign.

When our clients came back to New Image, there was a general feeling of excited trepidation. 

Will I have lost fitness? Is it going to hurt?!

If you’re getting back into it, or you’re inspired post-isolation to get started on a health and fitness routine, my first piece of advice is the same: EASE IN. This is not a time to just randomly get stuck in, balls to the walls.

We want you in this for the long haul, so I want to help you make exercise safe, effective and even enjoyable. 

Here are our top tips to get you back to movement successfully. 

Schedule it

Most things in our busy lives have appointment dates and start times. The kids’ school bell, your dentist appointment, knock off time at work and even the TV program you watch with the family every evening. 

When an activity’s scheduled, we prioritise it. 

So why, in your busy day, would you expect time for exercise to just appear. Or even worse, wait to feel like it?! 

You MUST book it in for it to happen. This is especially important when you’ve been out of the habit of regular exercise, and other activities have crowded out the time you once carved out for it. 

Schedule your exercise regime! You don’t need to block out hours of your day. In fact you may only schedule 30 – 45 minutes to get a walk in, perform some body weight exercises at home or attend one of our 30 minute customised training sessions at New Image. 

Just schedule it in and keep the booking with yourself.

Start easy

Keep it simple and easy to start with. Set yourself up to win and feel accomplished with small, achievable goals. 

The feeling you get when you tick items off your list is very empowering. In fact it’s proven that there’s a dopamine – or feel good – release when we complete action items we set for ourselves. This inspires you to take further positive action and creates a snowball effect of goodness.

On the flip side, if you make that list too hard to achieve or the exercise sessions are too intense, you may feel a sense of failure when you don’t stick to the plan. 

Start off with a simple routine like this:

• Brisk walking or low intensity cardio sessions to build an aerobic base (cardiovascular fitness). 
• 2x short and sharp strength training sessions per week. These could be a series of bodyweight exercises like squats, push ups, lunges and front planks. Primal movements will help your body make friends with resistance training. Then you can start adding external resistance such as weights, bands or a suspension trainer. 

Rest and recover

It’s always important to listen to your body. But this is especially vital when you’re getting back into it, or getting started. 

I don’t want you to go hard, hurt yourself or burn out, and then give up all together. Your goal should be longevity. 

Build easier, unloading days into your week. In these sessions, you might just go for a walk and do some light stretching or pilates movements. 

At New Image, we actively build recovery into your program to protect your body as you build it. 

Keep going

The great thing about keeping it simple to start is that you can build your exercise regime progressively as you go. 

As is always the case with exercise, consistency trumps intensity every time. It’s what you do day in, day out over time that makes the real difference. 

With a solid foundation of aerobic exercise and body weight exercises, you can now start to intensify your workouts or add more volume (time under load). 

You can do this simply by adding time to your walks and runs, increasing the speed of your efforts or adding some weight to the existing body weight exercises by holding some dumbbells.

Whether or not you increase the load or volume, just KEEP GOING. Before you know it, you’ll be sticking to your schedule, checking off sessions and developing a sustainable and healthy exercise habit. 

Want some extra guidance getting back into it? Or ready to get started on your active lifestyle? We’d love to help you. Click here to book a free session with one of our trainers. 

It’s saved me time, money, and from poor food choices when I’m ravenous.

On the flipside, NOT planning because “I don’t have the time” inevitably leads to wasting money on takeaway and putting food in my body that I know isn’t good for me.

When you’re busy, you shouldn’t be worrying about food choices. I can’t think of a bigger waste of your energy, willpower and precious decision making than mulling over what to eat 5 times a day.

As part of honouring your health and your time in 2020, one of the best habits you can implement is planning your food. 

Clients really freak out when I start talking about meal planning. They envisage their fridge piled high with containers of dry chicken and soggy broccoli. Gross. I don’t want to live like that either.

Meal planning is simply knowing what you’re going to eat ahead of time and having your choice ready to go. That’s it! Wouldn’t that be liberating?

But I want to be spontaneous! 

And how’s that working for you?

You should know by now that after work on Friday you like to have pizza and three glasses of wine. Maybe if you planned for it, you could enjoy it guilt free and perhaps even stop at the second glass.

If you know you’re going out for dinner, it takes two seconds to have a think about what you might like to have, and write it down.

The only way healthy lifestyle changes are going to work – and by “work” I mean you can do them forever – is if they’re enjoyable and don’t get in the way of living your life. 

I want you to eat out, go on holiday and try everything. But I want you to do it in an intentional way, with a view to including healthy choices most of the time.

If being spontaneous and up for anything robs you from feeling amazing in your own skin, how fun is it really?

When you make decisions for yourself ahead of time, you’re using your higher, rational brain that knows what’s best for you.

Make choices in the moment when you’re STARVING, rushed and stressed? That decision making beast is not looking out for your best interests.

If you have health and fat loss goals, a little less spontaneity may be the one thing that gets you there.

So we all agree now that planning your meals is a good idea. Right? Right.

Here are some simple steps to start meal planning. 

Define what meal prep means to you

You don’t have to splurge on 20 glass containers and spend hours on Sunday making all your food for the week. That sounds completely overwhelming, and you’ve got better things to do.

The best place to start is to simply write down ahead of time what you will eat. Start with the next 24 hours, thinking about what’s on the next day. It should take no longer than five minutes.

Then you can graduate to loosely planning out the week ahead.

This is as simple as:

• For breakfast this week, I’ll have yoghurt, oats and fruit.
• For lunch, I’ll make wraps with BBQ chicken and salad. Apart from Tuesday and Thursday, when I have client meetings so will eat out.
• Dinners will be one of these three options (a, b, c). These are the veggies that I will include this week.
• Snacks will be a protein bar/a muesli bar and a coffee.

Then you head off to the supermarket, with a firm view to what you’re actually, realistically going to eat, and buy what you need. And delight in how easy it is to shop when you have a plan!

Use the plate model

The simplest way to plan any meal is using the plate model that we teach our clients. It’s your guiding light for planning your meal, and also works when you consider your day and a week as a whole.

For each meal, you want to fill half your plate with veggies and a bit of fruit, then add a palm size serving of protein, a fist size portion of carbs and a little bit of fat.

Think first: what veggies would I like to eat this week, and how can I make them easy to grab? You could pre chop some salad veggies, trim some beans, and chop broccoli into florets.

Then think about protein sources. Maybe you’d like a bit of BBQ in there one night. A roast chicken is so versatile and can be a lifesaver. And cans of good quality tuna (we like the Sirena variety with chilli) are delicious tossed through a salad.

The point is to pick foods you enjoy eating, that are good for you and aligned with your goals, and then make them easy to go to with a little bit of organisation.

Make it yummy

Know yourself. If you’ve packed a lame sandwich for lunch, you’re just not going to feel like eating it when 1pm rolls around and you’re hanging for something hot and delicious.

Put in your plan foods you know you enjoy eating. Don’t get hung up on making it as lean and low calorie as possible.

The best lunch time meal prep in the world is leftovers from dinner! This is one of my best tips for being excited about what YOU’VE prepared for lunch. Just make extra dinner, and when you serve up, pop tomorrow’s lunch in a container ready to reheat. Easy!

Learn a couple of tricks to make your food taste good. If it’s not yummy and a little bit exciting, your meal prep will end up in the bin.

Avoid too much variety

Have a range of go-to meals that you know you love and are easy to prepare. Having something different every single day for every meal is overwhelming and is only for people with private chefs.

Have the same breakfast most days and rotating between a few healthy lunches that you enjoy will make life so much simpler.

Once you know your go-tos, you can keep staple ingredients on hand so you can always throw a meal together quickly. We always keep on hand a bag of salad mix, cherry tomatoes, tuna, microwave rice and bbq chicken for easy peasy meals.

It’s not boring if you like what you’re eating and getting results. Plus, you can stop thinking about food all the time and redirect all that energy to something else worthwhile!

Get help if you need it

If preparing healthy meals feels too hard, the alternative doesn’t have to be fast food. There are services that make preparing your own meals easy, or that do all the work for you.

We’ve tried a range of services from time-to-time when life gets busy, and they’ve been a lifesaver. You can go for full meal prep services like Food Goals (a local Hills business), My Muscle Chef or Thr1ve. Or if you enjoy cooking but want to skip the planning and groceries bit, you can try a meal kit service like Hello Fresh or Marley Spoon.

The bottom line is that no one is too busy to plan their meals. With just a little forward thinking and getting into the groove with organising your food, you’ll save yourself a ton of time, money and energy.

If I asked you to exercise every day of your life, would that strike you as extreme?

Most people would say YES. Only proper fitness obsessives would torture themselves daily with exercise. Surely that can’t even be good for you?!

If I could change just one message from the fitness world that’s lodged itself into our psyche, I would completely reframe the notion of exercise.

We know we “should” exercise more, and most versions of this idea include a lot of straining and no paining, no gaining. I would be the first to tell you that most people shouldn’t be doing intense exercise every day. Especially not when you’re getting started.

When I talk about daily exercise, I mean something different. I mean getting up and moving your body in natural, gentle ways. Like it was meant to do! Most people can tolerate this concept better when I call it “daily movement”.

I believe EVERYONE can commit to moving their body daily. And I’m also certain that we all benefit from finding ways to INCREASE our daily movement.

Ditching the perfectionist mindset

Somewhere along the way, we got the idea that if we can’t get in a 45 minute workout, then anything at all is a waste of time. You know we love a good structured sweat session at New Image, this can be an intimidating starting point. (If this sounds like you, read our post on the pitfalls of all or nothing thinking here).

With exercise, perfectionism is well and truly the enemy of good enough.

What if I told you just to get up and walk for 10 minutes today. Does that sound achievable? Could you possibly squash that defeatist voice in your head?: “10 minutes? What’s the point! No one can get results in 10 minutes a day!”

I promise you, something is ALWAYS better than nothing. Why not challenge yourself to do a little bit, actually get it done, and then feel great about yourself?

Daily movement is habit forming

If you promise yourself that every day you will move your body purposefully – even if only for 10 minutes at first – you become an exerciser. (You can read more about habit formation in this book one of our favourites!) Every time you keep that commitment to yourself, to your body, to your health, you are reinforcing exercise as a daily habit that you just do.

And guess what? This habit is naturally rewarding, because moving your body gently feels good!

You become a person who can keep promises not just to everyone around you, but to yourself. When you honour your word by following through daily and honour your body by caring for it, you actively grow in self esteem. And with every day that you build upon your habit, this surge in self belief compounds.

For most people, the biggest barrier to moving is the thought of it. The hardest part is to put your comfy clothes and runners on. If you can commit to doing this bit daily, the 10 minutes (that’s my initial ask!) is easy.

Moving your body is just good for you

It’s not just the huffy puffy sweaty stuff that’s good for us. Numerous studies show that regular exercise (we’re talking walking) is one of the BEST single things you can do for your health. It even has a preventative effect for a range of lifestyle related conditions.

Want to feel better and mentally clearer? Get moving. Want better sleep? A morning walk in the sunshine makes you feel tired at nighttime when you’re supposed to. Digestion feeling sluggish? Daily movement will help get things regular too.

For people suffering depression and anxiety, things get a little more complicated. But we know that exercise is highly effective as part of a treatment plan. Small bursts of movement (again, we’re talking a 10 minute walk) is a less daunting place to start and can have a big impact.

We weren’t designed to sit still for hours looking at a screen. We’re built to be out in the sun during the day, moving in different directions and and resting at night in a dark and cool environment. This is not the reality for many of us who work sedentary jobs and have long commutes. So we need to build an element of these factors into our lives somewhat artificially.

For now, I challenge you to make daily movement your goal.

You can make a MASSIVE difference LONG TERM, that’s right, LONG TERM if you focus on small bouts movement throughout our days.

I know and YOU know that we have windows of time, sometimes five minutes, 10 minutes and possibly 30 minutes when we’re in between tasks at work, waiting for our kids to finish school or training, during ad breaks on TV or we simply have downtime to get some movement in. You just need to prioritise and have an idea of what to do.

We want to support you

We’re so passionate about the benefits of daily movement that we’ve designed a 21 Day Challenge to get you to do just that! I get that committing to exercising every day for the rest of you life is a leap right now, but could you make a promise to yourself, for yourself, to move for 21 days straight?

We start our 21 Day Challenge on Monday September 16 and everyone is welcome! We’ll guide you through it with daily programs you can complete at home. We designed our programs to inspire you with doable sessions to build mobility, fitness, strength and all round wellbeing. But more importantly, you’ll finish each and every day feeling productive and like you’ve really achieved something!

All you have to do is make the commitment. It’s all about building momentum, and Spring is the best time to get out and enjoy the sunshine and get those natural feel-good rewards for your efforts.

You can register for the Challenge from Thursday September 5. Contact me on sean@newimagept.com.au if you’d like to learn more.