Make healthy behaviour a habit
Q I can’t stick to an eating and exercise plan long enough to see any results. I literally prefer my couch. Do you have any practical advice?
A While it’s tempting to tell you that the only way you will get your derrière off the couch is for you to physically get your derrière off the couch, the Water Cooler is a wise old sage and understands it’s a lot more complicated than that.
Perhaps you are lazy, but aren’t we all? We are genetically wired to seek out the least amount of physical activity possible — it helped our ancestors survive during protracted periods of scarce food. However, this is 2024. How many food delivery apps do you have on your phone?
Despite knowing we should exercise, most of us don’t. Despite knowing we should eat well, most of us prefer junk food, even if secretly. If you’ve read the Water Cooler for any length of time, you’ll understand that exercise is linked with dozens of health and mental wellness benefits, that it improves quality of life, and much more. You’ll also know that your food choices and habits have a direct correlation with preventable diseases.
This column has dedicated many words to the importance of habits, most recently in the context of new year’s resolutions and not falling off the wagon. The Water Cooler was delighted to read Vitality’s white paper called “The Vitality Habit Index”, in collaboration with London School of Economics. It includes remarkable statistics about simple exercise habits and mortality risk reduction, and makes habit-based recommendations.
We live in the age of data, and we all know that datadriven insights (jargon alert!) help businesses make the right decisions. It is true, though. And if this column’s advice wasn’t enough to move you, allow us to share some habit facts presented by Vitality that are based on insights from more than 1-million Vitality members in SA and the UK over 10 years.
The index quantifies habits over a six-week history of behaviour and can then predict the action in the seventh week and beyond. Yes, dear reader, we’re as predictable as Eskom se Push alerts just as you turn on the oven.
Between 40% and 50% of our lives is dictated by habits. The part of your life not spent exercising or eating well is also driven by habits. Bad habits are easier to form — isn’t it one of the great ironies of free will?
Vitality found that habits are “remarkably resilient”, and so if they are well-formed, there’ sa good chance they’ll persist. This is true for both exercising five times a week and choosing to sit on the couch and order McDonald’s instead (my words, not Vitality’s).
The index’s findings are that it takes between seven and 15 weeks for Vitality members to form strong habits, with most achieving this milestone in nine to 10 weeks. Anecdotally, I learnt long ago that the 21-day rule was a myth.
Using the data, Vitality suggests a three-step “laddering” approach to forming habits, which is remarkably similar to the advice shared on these pages over the years, where the only data available was obsessive desktop research and a trove of personal and anecdotal evidence. Now you have it on the authority of data derived from a million people (most likely including many of the people reading this, so look in the mirror).
Set a target by defining a goal against where you are on your health journey. Start small: choose an easy, practical activity and aim for frequency and consistency.
Repeat then intensify: keep doing the activity for six to eight weeks and then increase the intensity. Vitality says 5,000 steps three times a week is the sweet spot for sustainable habit formation that makes a difference, while 7,500 steps five times a week results in optimal health gains.
A Will Durant quote often misattributed to Aristotle reads: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
Perhaps we should misattribute this quote to the Water Cooler: “Health, wellness and fitness, then, is not an act, but a habit.”