Making the Healthy Choice the Easy Choice
Key Takeaways
Making the healthy choice the easy choice = using convenience to help us reach our goals rather than allowing the environment to be a barrier.
Examples include:
Making it easier to find an apple in your home instead of a cookie
Setting out your clothes and gym bag the night before a workout
Planning movement breaks, i.e. 5 push ups here, 10 squats there, etc. throughout the day.
Small-scale tweaks and habits may not seem important, but many daily habits strung together is your life. Being intentional with making the healthy choice the easy choice goes a long way over time.
Example - 20 extra push ups a day = 140 a week = 7,280 a year
Full Story
I’d like you to picture the following scenario: It’s a Sunday, around 8pm, on a brisk October evening. You’re watching your favorite football team or Bachelorette contestant when all of sudden your stomach begins to growl - that dinner of baked chicken and roasted vegetables that your mom prepared just isn’t sticking with you.
You mosey over to the kitchen, open up the fridge door, and what do you find? A fruit drawer stuffed to the brim with fresh apples and peaches, or some baby carrots and hummus, perhaps? Maybe a tub of greek yogurt and a jar almond butter? Or is it a barren wasteland, with nothing but a block of cheddar cheese and leftover pizza?
You may think that it doesn’t matter, that if you felt the urge to have a nutritious snack and were to come up empty handed, that you would simply slam the fridge door and head back to the couch. More often than not in these dangerous times when cravings arise, we eat whatever we can find, regardless if your snack turns out to align with your goals - a handful of pistachios and a pear - or one that quickly becomes a setback -that bowl of ice cream that turns into three.
Making the healthy choice the easy choice is a critical yet under-looked component of health and fitness sustainability. By prioritizing convenience in a way that is beneficial for your goals, you will begin to experience more “wins” throughout the day and create momentum towards your goals rather than unintentionally putting up barriers to success.
Lazy Creatures
Humans are lazy. We are designed to conserve energy and only use it at times we deem absolutely necessary. For the majority of human history, when calories were scarce and it took a lot of energy to acquire them - think foraging for mushrooms or hunting down a rabbit - this instinct helped us survive and reproduce.
But in today’s environment of abundance, our innate laziness can easily lead to complacency and chronic health problems. This tendency is especially common if the easiest decision, habit, or food choice is also one that negatively impacts our health.
Making the healthy choice the easy choice is an effective technique we can use to combat our energy-conserving instincts and optimize our health. You see, small tweaks to our environment and day-to-day decisions may seem insignificant in the long run, but upon closer examination they are all that matter.
Tips + Tricks
Daily habits and choices either create positive momentum and give you a push towards your goal, or they create setbacks. By strategically manipulating our environment to make it just a little easier to fit in a short bout of exercise, choose the banana over the Kit Kat, pick up a book instead of the remote, etc., we can begin to see marked change over time. Some examples of making the healthy choice the easy choice include:
Stock the house with nutrient dense foods
Make a list of all of the nutritious foods you enjoy and buy them, every week!
Place fruit, vegetables, nuts, etc. in plain sight or in the front of drawers. Make it easy to reach them.
When cravings come on, make it a habit to eat some protein or fruit/vegetables first and then eat the treat if you’re still hungry.
Rid the house of “junk” food or make it tough to acquire
Grocery shop on a full stomach to discourage buying more junk.
Put chips, cookies, etc. in the back basement or garage to create an extra barrier.
Make it habit to only have sweets if you bake them yourself. It is a lot more effort to bake cookies from scratch than to pull the Oreos out of the drawer!
Keep exercise equipment handy and associate habits with movement
Keep your yoga mat, exercise band, or kettlebell in the corner of your bedroom instead of stashed in the garage
Take mini movement breaks throughout the day. 10 push ups at lunch, 20 band pull aparts every hour, a few Bird Dogs every time a Taylor Swift song plays on the radio, etc.
Stack everyday habits with movement. For example, do 10 squats every time you brush your teeth (adds up to an extra 140/week!)
Get more out of your Netflix binges and social media scrolls
Save a show for when you cardio - for example, only watch “The Office” if you’re on the treadmill, bike, etc.
Do 10 minutes of mobility work for every hour of T.V. you watch.
Squat and scroll - when scrolling Instagram or Facebook, drop down into a full squat and work on your hip and ankle mobility while you’re at it
Set yourself up for success with going to the gym
For early workouts, pack your gym bag and set out your clothes the night before.
Have a plan/program written out before you work out to keep you on track and efficient.
If you’re starting a new fitness routine, make it a habit to just physically get to the gym. If you feel like leaving as soon as you walk in the door, do it! Baby steps.
Wrap Up
On the surface, you may be skeptical that such little adjustments could make any significant impact on our health, fitness, energy levels, or sense of well being. Yet once you consider that life is made up of seemingly inconsequential habits repeated over and over, their importance becomes more clear.
Think about your typical weekday - you may wake up at the same time, brush your teeth the same way, make the same coffee and breakfast, take the same route to work, eat lunch at the same time, etc. New healthy habits may not make an enormous impact in just one day, but when viewed at the level of weeks, months, or years, it becomes effortless to understand the relevance of being intentional with your daily routines.
Making the healthy choice the easy choice is a strategy that you can employ today that will pay significant health and wellness dividends in both the short term and certainly over the course of a lifetime.