Sick of endless wars with your unhealthy lifestyle behaviours?

Naturally humans want to be good. We want to feel good and be healthy. Firstly, let’s learn our ABCs… no it’s not the alphabet but a theoretical approach on how our behaviours are formed:

A (antecedent) --> B (behaviour) --> C (consequence)

Previously I wrote a post on managing our personal environment, As such as healthy/unhealthy food cues that lead to healthy/unhealthy eating Bs. We could also work on controlling the Cs to enhance our perseverance of healthy Bs. ‘Consequence’ has a negative connotation, however, we can use it in the context of a reward. Simply reward yourself in the right way i.e a positive C immediately after you perform a healthy lifestyle B to increase the likelihood that you will perform that B again. Some research has suggested that rewarding yourself for healthy behaviours may be more effective in achieving long term outcomes than only rewarding yourself for outcomes such as I lost ‘x’ kg. At the end of the day it would make more sense to focus on the daily healthy behaviours which eventually lead to the desired outcome.

Previous post: A (healthy food cue) --> B (healthy eating)

Today: B (healthy eating or physical activity) --> C (non-food or non-sedentary activity reward such as patting yourself on the back, going to the park/beach/markets, going out with friends, travelling, doing a hobby, going to a spa, getting a massage, gifting yourself, etc)

Reward yourself appropriately after a healthy behaviour today :)

ABC