If you’re struggling to maintain your New Year’s resolution (if you haven’t given up entirely), you’re not alone. The stats are overwhelmingly against you. However, if you equip yourself appropriately you can make the change that is at the core of your deepest desires.

As I was washing up this morning, I decided to put my earphones in and listen to a ten minute TED Talk. The Battle of Changing Your Behavior is the title of the talk presented by ex-drug addict and expert on behavioural change, Eric Zimmer.

Don’t wait to get motivated.

For the most part, people wait for something to come along and turn them on. You’ll be waiting a while. It’s pretty rare to get struck by lightning and even rarer to be struck by divine inspiration. As a writer, I know this as an absolute and undeniable fact. If you’re like me and write, sit down and type. It doesn’t need to be incredible, but having your fingers type something allows your own creativity to flow. The same can be said for anything else. So, you’re a linguist? Tee up a meeting with your learning buddy, open a new book in a language you’re learning. You want to become an amazing engineer and aspire to work for SpaceX? Well, start fiddling with your car or build your own PC.

"For things to change, you've got to change!"

This appears to be common sense insofar as someone who's a writer should write. I'm stating the obvious, right? The things that actually hold us back are attitudes, behaviours and in particular, habits. Each needs to be acknowledged and adjusted in order for things to change. My old mentor (I should clarify that a mentor can be anyone who offers guidance whether they know you or not), the late Jim Rohn, famously routinely said in his seminars, "For things to change, you've got to change!" He'd laugh as he would say it and so would the audience. His advice was sound and put the emphasis on ourselves to take control.

What he was saying in layman's terms was to take back our internal locus of control. I really only recently learned of the idea of an internal locus of control after reading Smarter Faster Better by Charles Duhigg. But the kernel of the notion implies that making active choices in your life - taking an alternative route home or just altering your breakfast from the norm activates your internal locus of control. When you see it working for the little things, you begin to believe that it can work for the bigger stuff, too.

And it will for you.

Start small.

In his video, Zimmer likens his method at becoming better at controlling your behaviour to the board game, Risk. The strategy involves choosing an area to focus on and centralising your armies. With respect to the game board as a whole, your armies are going to occupy a small space. This approach can be used in choosing a behaviour to change. While the expansiveness of your behaviours that you wish to control may be large, we need to narrow the focus. While we all love to tear ourselves apart to become better people, tearing the whole house down first isn’t the best method of renovating the bathroom. Prioritise what you need to change until it becomes a habit. If you are at the beginning of your journey, regularity in small pieces is far more useful to you in the long term than trying to change a lot all at once. It isn't sustainable and may hurt your willingness to try again in the future because of what seemed like a colossal failure.

If you're interested in meditation (which I believe, we should all be engaged in on some level) start with a minute, then two, five and so on until fifteen to twenty minutes a day (if that’s your goal) becomes a daily habit. Recently, I discussed a strategy to start your journey to regular exercise. You don't start with the gym membership. Anyone can spend money. It's the easiest thing in the world. Why do you think capitalism works? There's a very willing customer base for things that haven't even been dreamed up yet! Your focus should be to wake up at 5am every morning and walk around the block (start with a ten minute walk if you’re coming from a virtually sedentary lifestyle). Then, when you get back inside, go back to bed if you need to. The hour at the gym can wait until you’re used to getting up early. The rest of the process is added gradually until each step is solidified as a new set of "exercise-friendly" habits. The great part about this gradual change is perfect for exercise because as you increase your time exercising and your intensity gradually, you're unlikely to feel any huge discomfort along the way. It's like saving a few bucks a day. Before you know it, you've built up quite a stash (or muscle-mass)!

I've talked about meditation and exercise as important aspects of healthy living, but most people are at least subconsciously aware that there's an enormous elephant in the room. It should be addressed by each and every one of us if we care enough to at least consider the ramifications food has on your longevity and indeed, quality of life for both you and the people who depend on you.

The First Thing You Should Change is What You Eat [Here's the crux of it all.]

As Homo Sapiens, simply another animal that occupies a place on Earth, we have basic needs for life. And we only have one physical life (that I'm aware of). So, if all of this habit forming and reaching potential stuff is a big deal to you then giving yourself as much time to get there by working hard consistently over time should be a priority. We have all heard that so and so lived a short life, but boy they were so "out there" and "living life to the max" that they effectively lived two or three lives compared to the average Joe.

John Candy is one of my favourite actors of the 1980's and 1990's. As a movie star and acclaimed comedian revered by his peers, he tragically died at the early age of 43 in 1994. He died of a heart attack. Heart disease is STILL the leading cause of death and disease in the western world in 2019, so he can be forgiven for becoming a statistic back then. Prioritising his health could have given Candy an extra 43 years with us. While I'm certainly not trying to oversimplify the complexities of diet related disease, it doesn't appear as though Candy's number one goal was to eat more broccoli, less ice cream or to run a few miles a day. I think we should learn something from John Candy and the people out there that have been lured away from healthful living and into a zombified state of consumption.

Time to admit my bias. I'm vegan. No shit.

Disclosure complete. Although it is squarely on my profile!

The first major deliberate lifestyle choice I made as an adult (forget choices like going to university) that I believe made an enormous change in knowing I was capable of pretty tough self-control was when I went vegan seven years ago. Back then, I went cold tofu, so to speak. I am a passionate person and when I took a course that opened my eyes to the horror of animal agriculture and I had no argument, it was an easy mental state of mind for me to adopt; if it came from an animal, I have no right to it. What made it easy? I had a good reason and it was the only thing I was focusing on at the time.

However, others' comments did frustrate me in the early days. I recall my older sister remarking that she could understand if someone had to keep an allergen like seafood or nuts from their diet because it could kill them (she has coeliac disease), but willingly restricting all animal products from my diet appeared deathly dangerous to her. She couldn't seem to see what had illuminated within my own mind. It was as though someone had turned on an uncomfortably bright light that I couldn't shade myself from, while at the time, I thought she just must not know all the facts. I later learned of a psychological term called cognitive dissonance or contradictory thoughts, can actually be resolved in one's mind without taking any action For example, this might include adding an extra thought or two to make yourself feel better about how else you're living a compassionate life or even trivialising the ethics of veganism and overestimating the good of such things as "wild caught", "free-range" or "grass-fed" animals].

It's a scary thought to think by just adding a thought or two, all of a sudden we're feeling foot loose and guilty free!

Keep your eye on the prize.

Now, had I tried to go vegan, keep my grades at a distinction average, work full-time and start a family, all while trying to give up a drug addiction, I have my doubts as to whether I would still be vegan. The key is to dedicate change to one key aspect of your life at a time.

Now that I have my bias to veganism all cleared up, I’ll tell you what the essentials in life are. There’s only one. It’s your health. The three main aspects that require your attention are your diet, your level of physical activity and your mental state. Thankfully, the last one is very closely linked to the first two, so if you eat right and get moving more, you’ll likely just need to maintain friendships, devote an appropriate time to spend with your partner and practice some yoga or meditate.

Even these three will need to be narrowed down until they become stable habits that just require small tweaking and adjustments over time rather than a gigantic overhaul causing you immense feelings of strain and anxiety.

Start with your diet. Toss the junk.

For those interested, Neal Barnard’s video is definitely worth watching to understand that taking care of your health should be your number one priority.

If you're seriously thinking about the importance of diet it is important to get some clarity on the good, the bad and the ugly. After recently listening to Dr Joel Kahn, an interventional cardiologist from the United States talk with Rich Roll on his podcast, I began to understand that rather than continue the "he said - she said" combative diet war approach, it may be more beneficial (at least at first) to address their commonalities. The number one thing that most proponents of whole-food plant based diets, low carb diets, low fat diets, ketogenic diets, paleo diets, and even carnist diets would agree on is that processed food is the enemy.

So, if you're coming here with no background in any of these dietary patterns of consumption, rather than have me convince you that the healthiest diet is a whole-food plant based one, let's start at that common ground of the current cultural wave of eating - reduce with the goal to eliminate, processed food from your diet.

The first step is making the choice.

The process of making the first choice is the first choice. You've decided to activate your internal locus of control and are taking personal responsibility for the outcome of your actions.

We are all familiar with many processed foods. It shouldn't take too much mental strain to get you to conjure up the image of a chocolate bar [processed cacao stripped of it's fibre, baked-out vitamins and phytonutrients, added sugar, milk and soy derivatives (lecithin) mostly to improve shelf life and consumptive properties] as a highly processed sweet treat. Another example that immediately springs to mind is Coca Cola or any other sugar-laden drink for that matter. In essence, the primary ingredient is refined sugar. In the case where high fructose corn syrup is used, the corn kernels are ground down to form a fine white powder of corn starch which increases surface area upon which various microbially-sourced enzymes are used to convert the starch to glucose and fructose, leaving behind (or destroying) a wealth of nutrition that had evolved to support the early stages of growth of a new corn plant, or in the case of the Aztec, Inca and Mayan peoples, entire civilisations. Too deep?

The more you mull over the whole state of affairs, the more you realise what a colossal waste of energy it is to turn something readily available and nutritious (like a cob of corn) into something that isn't just deplete of nutrients but is contributing to the health crisis of the twenty first century.

Start small (again).

It's time to look at your diet. Everyone starts from a unique place and only your own honesty will take you to the place where you need to start. Honesty and accountability will get you there. If you break the whole process down to its parts, all these tiny habitual changes (James Clear calls them his Atomic Habits, also the name of the book) combined will transform the way you eat as a whole. My suggestion is to start with the one processed piece of crap you eat that you think you could easily do without. Maybe its just a Snickers bar on a friday afternoon after work or it could be switching from a box of doughnuts daily to just one doughnut daily. Once you see yourself proving to yourself that you can change whatever the hell you want to change in your life, it will empower you to make gradually bigger and bolder moves. You'll be able to say to yourself,

"Two months ago, I went from two bear claws and a coke with my sandwich at lunch to a sandwich, a coke and an apple. Now I've ditched both the pastry and coke for two more pieces of fruit and a bottle of water!"

Now, that sandwich might not be the healthiest (who knows what's on it, right?) but the sandwich wasn't the focus. The pastries were, then the coke was. Is it time to look inside the sandwich now? Well, that's your choice.

For anyone looking to make the combined small changes that start with getting off processed foods (or for any habitual changes that you want to change), I implore you to read James Clear's book, Atomic Habits. Even better, watch James Clear on the Rich Roll Podcast on Youtube as a primer. It is absolutely essential listening for habit change.

To Your Health,

Nick.

All content is original and belongs to @nickmorphew [19 March 2019].

Disclosure: This article was not a paid promotion and was not self-upvoted. Nor were there any affiliate links.

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I’m currently working on my debut fantasy novel based on my early work, Adventures in Elowyn Glade. Please contact me if you would be interested in supporting the project to secure a high quality publication.

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You didn’t think you’d leave here without me shamelessly plugging my other work, right?

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