Dietary Micro-Habits: Ideal Micro-Habits and Options

Dietary micro-habits

You need to keep the previous points in mind, but they are not mandatory rules in your dietary strategy. The following micro-habits will help you live a healthier life.

Even when you're feeling down, sick, or lacking energy, you can still achieve these simple micro-habit goals. And when you're full of energy and motivation, and want to make a change, you can exceed expectations and make even greater progress. You'll be more persistent and make changes smarter than before because your goals adapt to your circumstances, allowing you to accurately complete your daily workload. Most strategies require superhuman willpower to achieve sustained success, but the micro-habit strategy will always lead to success, regardless of your current (or future) state.

Ideal micro-habits

Ideal micro-habits are incredibly simple to implement and can get you started engaging in something. For example, a push-up can get you started exercising, and eating a serving of fresh vegetables every day can get you started eating more vegetables. When you start doing something, you're more likely to keep doing it; in other words, the thing you're most likely to do is what you've just done.

Extra tasks are optional, so don't be upset if you don't exceed them. If you haven't exceeded your targets for a month, ask yourself, have these micro-habits truly inspired you to start doing this? Perhaps you need to add one more step? A micro-habit is a spark, and any spark can ignite a raging fire.

If you can exceed your daily goals, then go for it. Exceeding your goals feels amazing, even if they're small. We're used to setting big goals and feeling frustrated when we can't achieve them. This time, focus on meeting or exceeding your daily goals. Think about the different psychological impacts of these two scenarios. A "normal goal" is running one mile a day, while a micro-habit goal is running for 30 seconds a day. If you run half a mile, by the normal goal standard, you've failed. But by the micro-habit goal, you've not only succeeded, you've exceeded your target!

Micro-habits encourage you to make progress, no matter how small. Setting ordinary goals leads people to believe that only large progress is valuable, a theory that is inaccurate, unreasonable, and even makes me angry. Everything on Earth is made up of tiny units. All success comes from small accumulations, and micro-habits allow you to achieve progress and success naturally through accumulation. The only thing in life that can be achieved overnight is winning the lottery (hitting the jackpot); other achievements-such as reaching goals and losing weight-require small decisions and actions every day.

The feeling of accomplishment is wonderful, and when you start achieving something every day, you become a success. People who frequently achieve success are more confident and proactive because they look forward to success, and their existing success motivates them to strive for even greater success. This may sound like a motivational cliché, but it's true; I call it the "success cycle."

Many people try to achieve success by motivating themselves, but they're doing it backwards. Success and motivation reinforce each other; the most reliable starting point is actually success, which fuels motivation and then leads to more success. The following micro-habits can help you succeed every day, whether you're motivated or not. When you consistently achieve success for days, weeks, or months in a row, you'll become better, stronger, and more successful than you are now. It's difficult to describe this experience in words because, by all accounts, these small actions seem unlikely to bring about such a significant change, yet they truly possess an exhilarating power.

Optional dietary micro-habits

My only fear is that you'll be disappointed when you see this list, thinking it's too short and too simple. Simplicity is good, but if you're used to demanding and complex diet plans, you might not think that way. Micro-habits are different from those plans because those plans don't work. The most powerful strategy is to be as simple as possible while still being effective.

Each micro-habit can be adjusted in many ways, so don't worry about having no options. The basic concepts are simple: to lose weight, you essentially need to increase awareness, choose healthy foods, and increase exercise. Your eating habits, emotional state, and attitude towards problems also affect your weight (mainly indirectly through these three pathways), so some micro-habits are related to these factors.

As you browse the list below, think about which micro-habits you'd like to try. Don't try to do every single one; generally, four micro-habits are enough, such as two dietary micro-habits and one or two exercise micro-habits. In Chapter 8, we'll discuss how to integrate these micro-habits (along with overall micro-habits and exercise micro-habits) into your life to create a micro-habit plan.

Eat an extra serving of fruit: First, you need to know how much a serving of fruit is so you know what your goal is. A "serving of fruit" refers to an apple, a large box of berries, a banana, or an orange. If you want to try this micro-habit, always keep fruit on hand. If you prefer convenience like me, buy fresh-cut fruit; it's ready to eat right away and won't spoil in the refrigerator. I highly recommend organic berries and peaches because non-organic fruits often have high pesticide residues. Berries and peaches belong to the "dirty dozen"-the 12 foods with the highest pesticide residues. If you're not buying organic fruit, remember to soak them for a longer time when washing them.

Fruit overload task: Eat more fruit, or mix it with full-fat plain yogurt.

Eat an extra serving of fresh vegetables: For some people, eating a serving of vegetables a day isn't really a goal because they already eat vegetables every day. In that case, make the goal more specific, such as eating a serving of raw vegetables every day, or eating an extra serving of vegetables. One carrot, three florets of broccoli, two florets of cauliflower, half a bell pepper (red, green, and yellow), one stalk of celery, a quarter of a cucumber, a handful of spinach, and eight slices of raw radish are all good choices, or any vegetables you like will do. If you prefer, you can also treat fruits that resemble vegetables as vegetables (such as four cherry tomatoes or half an avocado).

If you want to eat these raw vegetables with a dip, you can use hummus instead of sauce. The simplest hummus only contains chickpeas, olive oil, lemon juice, tahini, garlic, salt, and chili. You can also use guacamole, which typically contains avocado, onion, garlic, tomato, lime, salt, and chili. Be careful when buying pre-packaged dips from the store; they often contain large amounts of salt and preservatives (which can cause inflammation), and even a lot of sugar. "Vegetable dips" are basically just soybean oil with a few other things. Soaking vegetables in soybean oil and fattening sauces is not an ideal choice, even if the vegetables might help you achieve your ideal diet (if this is the only way you can eat vegetables, then eat them), it's ultimately not healthy.

Vegetable overload task: Eat more vegetables than usual, or eat a large mixed "jumbo" vegetable salad.

Make small upgrades to your healthy eating habits: these micro-habits are vague but actually very beneficial. Upgrade your diet little by little each day or at each meal (depending on your plans and the situation). For example, if you're eating out and usually order fries, try baked potatoes and green beans, or a salad – that's a healthy upgrade. Or, if you're craving a snack at home and decide to eat some unsalted nuts first instead of chips, that's also a healthy upgrade. Or, if you order a garden salad instead of lasagna and ask for olive oil and vinegar instead of regular soybean oil dressing, that's a double upgrade. You can make many dietary decisions every day, so you don't need to completely change your eating habits all at once (and you don't need to try). This strategy allows you to make small upgrades one after another, gradually solidifying the right eating principles.

The opposite of this approach is eating only two meals a day, or even just one, and not eating even when hungry. If you're still thinking about losing weight by starving yourself, read the preface of this book to remind yourself that controlling your calorie intake will lead to weight gain. If you usually feel hungry around 11 pm, but one night you don't, then don't eat anything. Listen to your body's signals: eat when you're hungry, and don't eat when you're not, and use micro-habit strategies to change your eating habits.

Upgrade Excess Tasks: Double or triple upgrades, with no upper limit.