How to build a healthy lifestyle

I have followed Ramit Seithi's I Will Teach You To Be Rich for years. He's a personal finance blogger who uses his human psychology background to affect change in his students. His book is good advice that you will hear from any other financial guru, but it differs in one critical way. 

It works.  

Apply the principles and the key messages then you will get results. It's a system, and a system will always yield results. You can apply systems to other parts of your life. 

Throughout the book, Ramit instructs you to automate the payment of your bills, pick a boring investment strategy (passive index fund) and cut spending on things you don't care about but spend on the stuff you do(he calls this conscious spending). Finally, he writes about the taboo topic of income. Raise your income through a raise(preferable) or a side business. 

The great thing about this book is that you can take its principles of tapping into human psychology and apply them to other areas of your life. 

After love and money, fitness and health are what people are after. 

I always love when you draw parallels with other fields in your own life. 

Fitness is one of those fields that suffers the same faith as personal finance. There are a lot of opinions out there. From different diets to different sports and exercises, the fitness-industrial complex is out to get your money whether you get healthy or not. There are fads, scams and good advice lost among the noise.

One of the best things about becoming healthy is that you can do it with almost any budget. Fit people exist in every socio-economic group. 

If you ask any regular gym-goer or fitness bunny how they stay motivated, they will each tell you something different. Look at their actions, and you will start to see a pattern. Fit people are fit because it's part of their lifestyle. It's part of their identity, and they will find a way to get to the gym even if they are not motivated that day. 

They were lucky to pick up good habits along life's meandering journey way and either cultivated a healthy environment or fell into one. 

If you are wondering how to get to the gym, it's best to look at your lifestyle and routines every day. Remember, you are what you repeatedly do.

Lifestyle is a big concept and can mean different things to different people. I'm going to break it down into environment, routines and habits. Finally, I "m going to give some tips about how I approach building routines. 

Fish can't fly. No matter how much you try to make them, they will never fly. Over the millennia, they have adapted to live in water. 

Your environment shapes you. Sometimes, it shapes your behaviour directly, just like a door with a handle always makes you pull, even if it says push. 

Other times, carrying a water bottle around will naturally make you drink more water(as well as having water on your desk). I leave a giant jug of water on my desk in the morning. This ensures I drink at least 1.5 litres of water a day. 

An environment can work with you. Living in a pedestrian-friendly city will make you walk more. 

An environment can work against you. Living in a car-centric area can make it hard to burn calories. 

No matter what, your environment affects you, whether you are conscious of it to not. Where I live, there is a busy street outside my building. At times, it got so loud that I bought an eye mask that plays music(to drown out the street noise). Now I can't sleep without some background noise. It's something I hope to break when I move house. 

Even though you can't control some of your environment, there are some tricks you can do. 

For example, I leave a fruit bowl beside the couch while watching TV. While watching TV, reaching for an apple or another piece of fruit is easy. 

I pack my gym bag the day before I go to the gym, so it's a simple matter of grabbing my bag in the morning.

If you bring junk into your house, you will get junk in the trunk. 

Even though your physical environment can shape you, what's in your physical environment can also have you. If the grocery shop includes loads of sugary snacks, then they will get eaten throughout the week. 

The human body is an impressive computer running many processes at once. One reason the body is so efficient is its ability to try and conserve energy through habits. Our bodies love to use habits whenever possible. For instance, let's take driving a car.

Driving a car is an advanced skill that many of us do daily. In the time it takes someone to reverse out of a driveway, they have done several small tasks. They have navigated their gaze between the side mirrors, back window, and middle mirror. Their feet have alternated between the pedals. Their hands have directed the steering wheel, and if they are driving a manual car, they must push the clutch down to change gears (unless you drive an automatic - in Ireland, we like doing things the hard way).

So many steps are involved in driving a car; it's a miracle we manage it. The curious fact about driving is that we do it on autopilot. Habits guide millions of people worldwide to work and back home every day.

Habits like this are so helpful, but did you know you can use a similar concept to set up "autopilot mode" in other areas of your life? We must step back and break down exactly how to create a habit to do that.

Each habit has three parts:

A cue – the moment that triggers the action

A routine – the action/routine that you want to perform

A reward – a positive outcome at the end that motivates you to continue

Smoking is an easy example of these three steps. A smoker will often get a craving as soon as they switch on the TV and sit down. The TV is the cue. The routine is lighting and inhaling the cigarette. The reward is the lightheaded feeling one gets upon inhaling and exhaling the smoke.

The smoking habit loop is present in millions of people around the world. Let's use the same principle to develop a good study routine.

We can use this cue, routine and reward system to develop new habits. 

Let's take the gym. Many people would like to go to the gym five days a week. The first step is to scale back the ambition and aim to go once a week.

We then develop a cue to start going to the gym. For some, it's first thing in the morning. For others, it's straight after work on the way home. 

We then perform the routine, which is the gym.

Finally, we reward ourselves with a tiny bit of chocolate to trick the brain into associating chocolate with completing a session at the gym. 

This is going to be my most controversial advice. Set your goals high but milestones low. 

Let's say you want to go the gym five days a week, but you go exactly zero days right now.

If you started trying that straightaway, you might burn out and soon fall off the bandwagon, only to repeat the trend later when "motivation" comes along.

Instead, for the first month or two, aim to go once a week(using what I discussed in the previous section). When you happily attend the gym once a week for a month, up it to 2 times a week for a few more months—then 3, 4 and 5. 

This is more long-term, not jumping into the deep end. The important thing is that we set the goal of going to the gym high but had achievable milestones along the way. 

Find ways to make it easier

Last but not least, find ways to make it easier for yourself. If you can join a CrossFit or a sports team, do that. If you can get a personal trainer to build your workouts for you, do that. 

Anything that will make it easier to achieve a healthy lifestyle will make you have a healthier lifestyle. Tear down barriers, no matter how small, and aim to improve little by little constantly. A 1% daily improvement will make you 37 times better by the end of the year. 

Let's sum up the article for those that like to skim.

Your Psychology can work for you and against you - Learn about behaviour (books such as Atomic Habits are an excellent place to start)

Set Goals but have small milestones that you hit along the way.

Respect the ability that your body has to create habits.

It's tempting to write(or make TikTok reactions) about the latest diet and fitness trends. I see the views those people get, and I think I should do that too. 

However, I never do. Ultimately, fads come and go, but principles stick around. Learning to build a healthy lifestyle, no matter your diet or exercise plan, will yield long-term results. Learning to adapt, stay resilient, and adjust to setbacks is how you get to where you want to go. 

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