Habit Forming

It's amazing how quickly we can fall out of habits. While I did say I wouldn't be able to blog nearly as much for the time being due to other commitments, I certainly didn't intend for it to completely dissipate as it has. This is due, largely, to the fact that it simply hadn't become ingrained as a habit just yet. Despite the fact that I had done it pretty consistently for a few weeks, it hadn't become automatic. And this highlights why it's so hard to change many habits at once. 
We've all been there. We see what we want, we've decided we're changing our lives for the better, and the best way to get there is to change everything! Unfortunately, it just doesn't work that way. I've heard it takes roughly one month for a habit to become automatic. And, while it's difficult to focus on doing 18 different things on a daily basis, it's a lot easier to focus on one. "I will do X every single day," is a lot easier than "I will do X, Y, Z, oh and A, B, C, too." Our minds simply don't work like that, especially because it gets really easy to say "fuck it all" the first time to you forget to do B, even though that one time, in and of itself, is not a killer.
This realization, though, has given me newfound respect for those who work with obese and overweight populations looking to lose weight. While it's not a population I work with, it is obviously a population that needs it. Most people see the fancy gizmos the douchebag trainers on the Biggest Loser berating people and acting like general assholes and assume that is what's necessary for weight loss. But none of it is. The best coaches and trainers in that segment of the population get people to change their habits. The majority of these people have spent a lifetime building poor eating habits, poor exercise habits, and poor life habits in general. What they do with the rest of their life doesn't support health, and their poor health drives them to continuing to make unhealthy choices in other aspects. The trouble, then, comes with choosing which habits to change first. The answer should be "the easiest one to change," but the one most people choose is either "all of them," or "the one that will make the biggest difference" (even though it's also the hardest one to change). I certainly don't have all the answers, or even very many, but I think it's something to ruminate on. And who knows, maybe down the line it's a group I become more interested in working with.