Last week’s tip briefly discussed three ideas to make accomplishing any goal easier: (1) willing vs. won’t, (2) small actions > big actions, and (3) consistency + persistence = progress.
This week I want to add another idea that is both related to the other three and, in a way, also stands on its own.
Change one thing, then evaluate (and repeat)
Years ago I read an analogy that illustrates the idea well:
Imagine that you’re a gardener. You have five containers sitting in your basement, but they’ve all lost their labels. You remember that four of them contained fertilizers and the final one contained an herbicide. How do you determine which container holds the herbicide (assuming all the contents look alike)?
The answer is that you label the containers 1–5, put a little bit of the contents of each container on its own tiny spot in your garden, label the spot where each container’s contents were applied, and then evaluate what happens in each of those tiny spots. The single tiny spot where nothing grows (or, where whatever was growing dies) is likely to be the spot where the herbicide was applied.
In other words, you run five individual tests in which you make a single change—that is, applying the contents of one container to a small area—and then evaluate the results. Seems pretty obvious, right?
It also should seem pretty obvious that what you wouldn’t do is apply the contents of multiple containers to a single spot in your garden and then try to evaluate the results.
And, yet, when it comes to our fitness, nutrition, and health, we very often do something similar to the latter example. We read about a specific diet or training program, get excited about what we read (or are told by a friend, Oprah, etc.), and then try to change everything at once.
While our initial enthusiasm and commitment are commendable and typically produce some kind of results in the short-term, our old habits begin to creep back in after the novelty of the new program wears off (worst case) or when the program itself ends (best case, but still not great).
By trying to change everything at once, we end up in the long term with the same habits we had when we started and often also lose the progress we made in the short term.
Why changing one thing seems unappealing
There are a variety of reasons why changing only one thing at a time in the pursuit of our goals seems unappealing. Perhaps the most important reason is that we’re impatient for results and think that changing one thing will effectively not produce any.
As I mentioned last week (Small Actions > Big Actions section), we do often need to change a variety of things in the long run in order to achieve our goals. But we also typically underestimate the positive effect that making a single change can have on our energy & mindset, an improvement to both of which will make implementing future changes easier.
In any case, here’s one last idea to hopefully help you feel a bit more comfortable with implementing a single change at a time: Think of where you were last year in relation to a goal that is important to you. How many new habits do you have now that you did not have last year?
Now consider how many new habits might be a regular part of your life by this time next year if you implement only a single new habit each month for the next 12 months. How might those new habits positively impact your life?
Putting it into practice
Whatever your current goal(s), we can all make some type of improvement to our nutrition—myself included.
- To keep this simple, determine the meal that changes the least for you from day to day.
- List out what your options typically look like for that meal.
- Based on what you currently know about nutrition—even if you feel like you don’t know a lot, you still do know something—how can you make it just a little better? Some options to get you started if you’re really in the dark:
- Add a glass of water (as a juice replacement?)
- Add a little protein (if you eat mostly carbs at the meal)
- Include a veggie (in an omelet? or smoothie?)
- Use real cream instead of something artificial (if you drink coffee with your cream 😉)
- Repeat the process with another meal only after the changes you’ve made for the current meal feel normal.