There is an aspect of creating healthy habits that I wanted to highlight here because it affects your success more than you can imagine. The way you think and your ideas, what you say to yourself about what you do, how you see, and what you believe about it have a huge impact on whether you continue or spontaneously on your old habits.
Many of us think that our genes are involved in everything, but that has proved to be untrue. For example, when people are told that they have a genetic predisposition to a negative reaction to exercise, their bodies begin to respond appropriately, even when they do not. When exercising on a treadmill, those people get tired more quickly than before and experience a decrease in oxygen absorption and lung capacity. Just as they have been told they will not be successful gymnasts - and they believe that! Our brain is more influential than we realize.
Here is another powerful example of this. Researchers recruited 84 hotel girls and divided them into two groups. At the beginning of the study, none of them knew that they had already met or exceeded the U.S. guidelines for exercising by doing their work each day. Sixty-seven percent of the maids told the researchers that "they did not exercise."
Group # 1 was told that by simply doing their job, they burned more calories and received more than enough exercise. Group # 2 was not told this. Thirty days later the researchers found that those Group # 1 maids lost an average of 2 pounds, lost their body fat, and lowered their systolic blood pressure by 10 points. All of this was accomplished without having to do any further “exercise” outside of their work or change their diet altogether. The other group did not have any positive results from these results.
In another study, researchers thought that by putting people in a better mental state, they might be able to associate with their better, smaller version, their bodies might follow. Therefore, they re-created the world of 1959 in a group of older subjects and asked the subjects to live as if it had been twenty years earlier.
Eight men in their 70's were taken to a converted monastery where they were ordered to behave as if it were 1959 when the ruling party lived in the same area but did not pretend to be decades earlier. Nothing, mirrors, modern clothes, no pictures other than pictures of their very young, undermines the idea that they were 22 years younger.
A week later 63% of men who lived as if it were 1959 had better schools of intelligence at the end of the test than before, compared to 44% in the control group. In fact, on the last day of the test, the men who seemed to be weak a few days earlier ended up playing a game of football you had never seen on the grass before. Four independent volunteers, who knew nothing about the study, looked before and after photos of men in the experimental group and saw those in the "back" photos as an average of two years younger than "before."
So how you see what you do, the words you use to talk about it, how you share the meaning of what you do, and the purpose of it all are important. Speaking positively about yourself, getting used to seeing your efforts as effective will help you to be consistent and successful in your efforts to improve your health.
Do your thoughts, words and ideas go hand in hand to achieve success in your health goals?
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