Change your environment, change your habits. Believe it or not, your environment can make or break you when it comes to building better habits for yourself.
As discussed in much of our content, shaping or changing your environment could help you successfully develop the habits you want out of life.
Hacking your environment in a way that influences your habits will allow you to eat better and live healthier - and you don't even need to overthink it.
You are the average of the five people you spend your time with, so spend your time with me on this article today.
Our environments can influence us significantly, despite what we say or do. Simply put: you're going to find it pretty difficult to work out in your bedroom compared to a gym. In addition: according to the book Mindless Eating, a bigger plate influences you to eat bigger.
Despite us knowing these things, we give in often to our surroundings.
We will break down some practical environmental hacks for the most common places we reside: For nutrition, our home, and the workplace. For exercise, our gym, or an outside park or field.
Every time I had junk food in my home while I dieted for fat loss... I eventually ALWAYS gave in.
Home is what will make or break you when it comes to trying to go through a weight loss program or lifestyle change. Because it is our sanctuary, it is where everyone typically succumbs to their lack of willpower.
It was a rough day at work. We are exhausted. Our environment at home typically makes us unwind: we get comfortable and lazy.
Here are a few "environmental hacks" that will work in your home:
Recall that when your willpower is gone, you are typically using more of your instinctive System 1 brain. This part of our brain is extremely lazy, and if your distractions are hard to reach or see... you will be too lazy to get them.
Evidence on the environment in regards to food supports this, and I can tell you that changing your environment in such small ways can make a big impact.
Since we spend most of our time in the workplace on weekdays, this environment can be a big impact on developing our desired lifestyle.
Here are a few environmental workplace hacks you can utilize:
I've worked at a job where it was "natural" to gain 15 pounds after working for the company for 3 months: there was food everywhere.
Resist your temptation by not having these foods in eyesight, and keep yourself accountable with other habit-building strategies we have highlighted in the article below.
When you head into your gym or your park after consecutive sessions from habit, your mind will most likely associate this environment as where we put in work.
Now how can we end up getting to the habit to jump-start our exercise? Here are a few "environmental hacks" that I typically recommend:
Exercise is sometimes one of the harder things to get into the habit of because there are so many things going on in our lives.
Your goal is to make exercise a habit by making going to the gym an easy task.
You don't know how guilty I used to feel if I had gym clothes in the car and I didn't go. The visual reminder kills us internally!
Now that we have these introduced hacks into these three environments, we wanted to conclude this article with a summary for each section.
To really hone in on these environment hacks, we also added a few other habit-building tips to truly take these home.
For Nutrition:
For Exercise:
Thanks for reading Reforged Legion!
If you have any questions or want to add more insight on habit building and environmental hacks that have personally worked for you, feel free to add them below or the email me at tony@reforgedperformance.com.
Now go out there and crush your goals!
If you look at your body in a biological standpoint, we have various processes that occur in a Yin & Yang like-way. For example, anabolic and catabolic processes are both a necessity for our sleep/wake cycles, for exercise & recovery, and more.
These are a part of our Circadian Rhythm, which are physical, mental & even behavioral changes that follow our 24-hour sleep-wake cycle.
In understanding this, we can explore a new and promising area of study: Chrononutrition.
In this post, we are going to talk about Chrononutrition, an area that could potentially be great opportunity for building healthy habits towards fitness.
Let's dive in!
Everyone uses the scale to track progress, but I’d argue it’s one of the least important methods to track progress.
It's never consistent, due to a variety of factors: sodium intake, water intake, stress, hormones, poor sleep, and more.
So today, I wanted to talk about all of the Body Performance Indicators you can utilize to measure progress.
Let's dive in!
One of the more common questions that gets asked in fitness is if 6 meals a day is "mandatory".
It's not necessarily mandatory, but it is commonly utilized by pro bodybuilders in their contest prep phases.
I have been eating 3-5 meals a day for years, implementing 4 strategies I typically prioritize my nutrition with.
So with that, we are going to dive into 4 Nutrient Timing strategies you should utilize in this post.
Let's dive in!