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Are You in the Habit of Taking Control?

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October 8, 2009
	Dr. Gary Huber : Head Medical Ego

I am your constant companion. I am your greatest helper or heaviest burden. I will push you onward or drag you down to failure.  I am completely at your command. Half of the things you do you might just as well turn over to me and I will be able to do them quickly and correctly. I am easily managed; you must merely be firm with me. Show me exactly how you want something done and after a few lessons I will do it automatically. I am the servant of all great men, and alas, of all failures as well. Those who are great, I have made great.  Those who are failures, I have made failures. I am not a machine, though I work with all the precision of a machine plus the intelligence of a man. You may run me for profit or run me for ruin; it makes no difference to me. Take me, train me, be firm with me, and I will place the world at your feet. Be easy with me and I will destroy you.

Who am I?  I am Habit!  (author unknown)

Your habits can make you or break you.  They will drag you down or rescue you and keep you moving forward. So if habits are so important then we need to ask the question “who is in charge of your habits”?

It’s amazing to me how many people just surrender control of their lives to so many outside influences. We walk through life meeting the demands of everyone else yet too often we fail to meet our own demands.  We do what our boss, spouse, children, school, government, church, friends tell us to do and we form habits to accommodate these influences often without asking the simple question “how will this affect my health”? We are nothing more than a constellation of habits that play out over and over again. As the days roll into weeks, then months and years we seem to drift into situations that are often undesired such as weight gain, poor physical condition, lousy sleep, and achy joints. But the reality is that we chose these condition, we chose our outcome based on our habits. 

Most habits exist simply because we haven’t explored other options. Maybe you eat cereal every morning because that’s what you were taught as a child and that’s what you’re used to. Is this a good habit? Maybe not. Maybe you don’t eat breakfast at all because you taught yourself years ago that there isn’t time, we must rush to get to work.  The result of both of these habits may be weight gain or poor energy and as time goes by we feel powerless to change and accept our fate as “just getting older.” 

I recently had a 26 year old women tell me that when she complained of weight gain to her health care provider she was told, “just get used to it, you’re getting older.” Getting older?  She is 26 !!!  If 26 is “older” then just shoot my rusted carcass and throw it in a ditch. What a load of garbage.  I don’t care if your 86, your habits are yours to change, you have infinite control and you can dial in the quality of your life if you chose to take control. 

Do you want a better existence? Would you like to fine tune your health and increase the energy and drive in your life? Then take a good hard look at your habits and decide if they are serving you, or are you just a slave to your habits. You can be and do ANYTHING. Yes you can exercise in the morning before work if you CHOOSE to and make it a habit. You can eat more vegetables even if you hate all vegetables just by slowly adopting one vegetable at a time and gently working them into your diet. It is an option you need to explore and decide to commit to. Your life is not set in stone, change the parts you don’t like.

So how do you form a new habit? It’s not that difficult. Simply identify a habit that you want to change.  Let’s take a real life issue such as eating chips, ice cream, soda and other food-like toxic substrates late in the evening. Many people eat “crap” while watching TV at night, which puts unwanted pounds on their body. First identify why this is hurting you. 

It’s increasing your weight, which will increase your cancer risk, cause high blood pressure, and affect the way you feel about yourself.  Yuk.  So it’s a bad habit and we can see WHY. 

Next identify a solution that you are going to look forward to. Eating pickles and bean sprouts is not a solution unless you just happen to be pregnant and that combination appeals to you. So find something you could genuinely find attractive such as organic peanut butter on a nice sweet crunchy organic apple. Oh, now you’ve got something. 

Next go to the market and actually buy the peanut butter and apples and have them ready to go. Then, very important step here, throw the chips and ice cream in the garbage. Not just on top of the garbage where you are likely to pull a George Castanza and pull it out of the trash in a panic, but really bury it under the coffee grounds and used tissues. 

OK, now you’re set. When you get up in the morning I want you to remind yourself well in advance that your snack tonight will be apple and peanut butter. If that’s your PLAN then you are much more likely to follow through.

Lastly, eat your snack on cue in the evening and repeat this process for 4 weeks. You can pick other snacks but if you repeat this process for 4 weeks then odds are you will have successfully developed a NEW HABIT !!!  

Now don’t celebrate by eating ice cream and chips but pat yourself on the back and look for another challenge. 

No one cares more about you than YOU (except maybe me, but I’m too modest to mention it).  Take control of your habits and redefine yourself.  You are the only one standing in your way.