Habit-Breaking Methods To Lose Weight

The International Journal of Obesity published a fascinating study on April 23rd, 2018 that explored how breaking habits was effective in maintaining long-term weight loss.

This was not a diet program.

This was a habit-breaking study.

Every day, the habit-breaking group were told to do things like:

- take an alternative route to work
- listen to a different kind of song
- write a short story

Weird eh? 

By just getting out of routine, weight benefits began to accrue. 

Of course, all participants wanted to reduce their weight, improve their diet and live a healthy lifestyle. The habit-formers were given a list of 10 new habits to form around eating.

It makes sense. At ATSuccess – you also enter a habit-breaking/habit-forming behavioural program. The aim is simple: to increase student engagement by altering your habits of thinking. 

Learn to become a markeacher, and stop separating teaching and marketing.

Your thoughts are movements - you break oppressive thinking habits by replacing them with positively designed yes plans. Inhibition is the activity that doesn't allow the old habit to take place. You cannot go down if you are going up. Why wait?

It starts very simply.

Do you know how to question your beliefs about your head/spine when practising as a teacher? This you can apply to your students…

At a session in Shinjuku last year, 38 Contact-Centre Operators were busy breaking the habit of how they leaned towards the screen.

As part of learning a BodyChance-developed back-and-neck-pain exercise, Operators learnt that head/spine/hip movement is critical to breaking habits and forming new ones.

People often lead the chin towards the screen.

This will cause downward pressure on your spine. You may not notice it at first - it just happens. Not once, but hundreds of times in one day. By days' end, you are in a state of collapse: sitting slumped, feeling tired and mentally distracted from your work.

As a teacher, you show them how to shift that habit. Let your hips move you to the screen – that inhibits the chin-push. Give them lots of "Yes" plans. Positive reinforcement works better than saying "NO" all the time. And that's not my opinion – the social scientists have asserted this in study after study.

How often are you saying "NO"? 

Your job is to translate the negative to the positive, the complex to the simple. People want something practical, something they can remember. 

Be simple, and you'll be successful.

Make sense?

It helps to have ATSuccess to explore your teaching questions – not just with me, but with a community of teachers who don't let their egos get in the way of growing their work.

I will be re-opening the ATSuccess community soon. Are you interested enough to write and say: "Jeremy, I want to be part of this community."

Let me know!