What do you want for your body? In 6 months from now, where do you hope you’re body is at?

• Do you want to be stronger and actually have some muscle mass on your body that you can see and feel
• Maybe you want to be leaner and have less body fat
• You want to have more energy, better balance, stronger bones, less pain
• You want to wake up one day, find yourself in the bathroom putting on your clothes and think to yourself “My body feels really good and I’m happy”

I don’t know YOUR personal story, but I do know that the improvements in your body that you crave is on the other side of months, and maybe years of consistent effort.

You don’t need me to tell you that being consistent with your routine and your healthy habits is what’s going to get you there. UGH. (I know that’s not what you want to hear, but deep down you do know it to be true.)

So what’s the opposite of being consistent?

• Erratic, haphazard, and all-or-nothing behaviors
  • One week you’re all-in, the next week you’re switched off and you’re doing nothing
  • Of course, there’s always legitimate excuses for WHY you had to turn things off, I doubt you just wake up one day and say NO

Usually, you wake up one day and say, I’m going to do this! I’m going to start working out again and eating better!

This is what happened to my friend Monica - She got a burst of motivation (maybe combined with a little bit of conviction), and said it’s time to buckle down. She has a pretty great home gym in her garage, so she decided that she’s going to go out there every morning and do a 30 minute workout. And then she’s going to make herself a smoothie for breakfast every day and really cut back on the sweets in the afternoon.

• Obviously, these habits are great! When done consistently they’ll make a big difference for her health.
  • On week one of this, she got through Wednesday and was feeling really good, but on Thursday morning, she woke up to a text from her sister saying that they needed to go check on her mom for the day, which was a 2 hour drive away. It was an emotional day, so she didn’t have the bandwidth to make healthy food choices for the rest of the day, and into the next.
  • The workout got skipped, which lead to the entire rest of the week going down the drain and she ended up doing nothing the next week, too.
  • But the following week, she pulled it back together and committed to the plan again.

THIS IS A PERFECT EXAMPLE OF ERRATIC, INCONSISTENT, ALL-OR-NOTHING BEHAVIOR. This lack of consistency is preventing her from getting the breakthrough.

Let’s get personal - I want to ask you a couple questions:

How does this look for you? In what areas are you inconsistent?

• Is your inconsistency showing up from one week to the next?
• Or is it literally day by day? You’re really inconsistent from the week and into the weekend?

What would change for you if you finally became really consistent with your habits? If you were steady?

• How do you think that would impact your body?

What’s the Solution?

Ok, I’m going to put on my coaching hat and give you my favorite and MOST EFFECTIVE solution for eliminating the erratic, all-or-nothing behaviors and finally establishing consistency.

I have taught this method to thousands of women. In fact there are over 2,000 women (and men) in my training programs right now that are learning this as week speak. In fact, it’s probably the most important thing that I could ever teach you for your health.

The number one strategy for getting rid of inconsistency is to learn how to HABIT STACK.

Let me teach you how to do this - This is about to change your life.

What is Habit Stacking?

• Habit stacking is taking a list of good, healthy habits that you’re trying to implement, choosing to only implement one at a time, and only adding a new one into the mix when the first one gets mastered.
• I saw another trainer online give a list of “health goals for June”
  • Wake up 20 minutes earlier
  • 5 fifteen minute workouts a week
  • Drink 2 litres of water a day
  • Go to bed by 10pm
  • Walk for 20 minutes
  • 10 minutes of meditation a day
  • Eat a savory breakfast
  • Stretch each day
  • Adopt the 80/20 rule
  • Stop beating yourself up
• Ok, these are great - these look good! I agree with pretty much all of these, and we can all agree you would feel a lot better by doing all these things. But these are 10 habits! Do you know how impossible it is to learn and adopt 10 new habits all at once?
• If instead of trying to do all 10, with the habit stacking model, you would just take the first one (waking up 20 minutes earlier), and only focus on that for several days until you have it mastered. And then you keep that one going, and then stack in the next habit (5 - 15 minute workouts a week).

How do you implement it?

• I don’t think that list is the best to work with. The first things on the list are actually really hard when the rubber meets the road.
• Let’s break it down into two categories - just to stay mentally organized: Fitness & Nutrition
• Choose one really easy fitness habit to start practicing and one really easy nutrition habit to start practicing (Pick something that you’re not already doing, but it has the lowest barrier to entry):
  • Fitness: Go for a 10-15 minute walk every day
  • Nutrition: Drink a glass of water alongside your meals
• After you’ve got some rhythm going with that and it’s feeling consistent and easy, you’ve broken through the unfamiliarity barrier, then it’s time to add in the next habit
  • It’s habit STACKING not habit TRADING - Don’t introduce a new habit and accidentally quit the previous one

Reasons Why Habit Stacking Works

1. It gives you the chance to be laser focused on just one thing at a time, significantly increasing your odds of mastering that skill
2. You have a clear picture of the easiest habits to default back to when life gets too hard to do all of them (e.g. story about Monica)
3. You learn some really good character traits along the way, like patience, perseverance and flexibility

Not everybody has the wisdom to approach their health and fitness this way. This takes a lot of wisdom and maturity, to say “I don’t need instant gratification - I’m going to go slowly and build in one habit at a time”

This is how you’re the tortoise, not the hare.

Proof of Transformation

Habit stacking can be annoying. It might feel beneath you, you’re better than this, you can do more than this?

• But can you? What’s you’re track record of consistency?
• Maybe it’s time to scale back, set a bunch of habits to the side, and build back up one small thing at a time.

Jumpstart 30’ers with their consistency.

Takeaways/Call to Action

My action step for you to day is to write down just ONE fitness habit and just ONE nutrition habit that you’re going to get laser-focused on.

More Resources & Links

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