Her Online Bookshelf is proud to welcome our guest blogger, Lynn Johnston.
We’re giving away a copy of The Kaizen Plan for Healthy Eating by Lynn Johnston! Read this post and comment (answer the questions at the end of this post) for your chance to win the book!
Does the Tortoise Always Beat the Hare?
I'm sure you've heard Aesop's fable, The Tortoise and the Hare, in which the swift but erratic Hare loses a race to the slow but steady Tortoise.
When I was a kid, I found this particular story annoying. I didn't want to plod through my life like a boring old Tortoise. I wanted to be fast and bouncy like the Hare! And I wanted the Hare to win.
Fast should beat slow all the time, shouldn't it?
As an adult, I've come to appreciate the meaning of that fable. The Tortoise and the Hare symbolize the two basic strategies that human beings use to achieve a goal or make a change: innovation (the Hare) and incrementalism (the Tortoise).
Innovation is what we normally think of when we contemplate change. It's drastic, sweeping change that attempts to replace what already exists with something completely new.
Most diets are like this. You throw out or hide all the food in your house that isn't allowed on the diet, you stock up on all the foods you're supposed to be eating, and you put yourself on the new regimen of unfamiliar meals, intending to change your eating habits overnight.
Most plans for getting in shape are like this too. You sign up with a gym or buy free weights or an exercise DVD, and you set your alarm an hour earlier so you can work out first thing.
Change through innovation is exciting, and that excitement can carry you through the initial phase of the change. When you're innovating, everything is fresh and new. It's also fast; a lot of change is crammed into a relatively short period of time. You expect to see results quickly when you're innovating.
But innovation is based on the assumption that you're determined to change your habits overnight, that you've got the discipline to follow the new program to the letter, and the mental energy to be constantly vigilant against the old habits, which sneak back in whenever you're tired or distracted.
Innovation can also be disruptive, because the learning curve for innovation is steep. You may have to drop everything else while you're learning how to adapt to the new process and monitoring yourself for lapses. Innovation can be stressful.
Because of this, many attempts to change through innovation fail miserably, after a short but intense period of effort. After two weeks of eating nothing but celery sticks and vegetable soup, the diet goes out the window. Sore, strained muscles make a second visit to the gym torture, and the third visit never happens. Your resolve weakens, and you fall back on old habits.
Innovation is successful when the person making the change is highly-motivated. Unfortunately, this level of motivation can be hard to muster unless you've had some sort of wake-up call. Your boss threatens to fire you if you're late again. You have a heart attack and your doctor gives you three months to live unless you stop eating bacon and start eating broccoli. Your husband refuses to kiss you again until you've quit smoking.
When your motivation is more along the lines of "Gee, it would be nice to fit into my skinny jeans," chances are you're going to run out of willpower after about a week of dieting. Because even though it would be nice to fit into those jeans at some unspecified time in the future, it seems even nicer to eat that cupcake with the vanilla buttercream frosting right now.
Does that mean we're all doomed to be chubby and out of shape and forever failing to achieve our goals?
Thankfully, no. There's a second approach to change that doesn't require a life-or-death, all-or-nothing mentality. It's called incrementalism.
Incrementalism is the strategy of taking small, consistent steps toward a particular goal. Incrementalism assumes that you are not a juggernaut of willpower, and that habits formed over a decade or two are not likely to be changed overnight. It allows you to break your goal down into easy, doable tasks that fit into your current schedule. It recognizes that the bigger the change you're trying to make, the more likely it is that you'll backslide.
Let's say your goal is to eat healthier. That sounds like one goal, doesn’t it? But it requires a lot of willpower because it’s really a lot of little changes that you have to stay on top of all the time. (That, incidentally, is why it’s so darned hard to go on a diet.)
The incremental approach lets you separate that big goal into all its little changes and lets you focus on one at a time.
Let's contrast the two approaches:
Innovation: You could swear off sugar, throw away all the junk food in your house, go grocery shopping for healthy food, buy a cookbook of healthy recipes, and then try to learn how to cook (and enjoy eating) healthier food next Monday. But that’s going to make next week pretty stressful, because you're going to be tackling a new learning curve while, at the same, time, exhausting your willpower by resisting cravings. Plus, you'll have spent money you hadn’t budgeted for, so you’ll feel even worse if you're not successful in sticking to the new diet.
Incrementalism: Deciding that you're going to buy several pouches of frozen veggie mixes and eat one each day is a simple, affordable change that doesn’t require you to adjust any other aspect of your life.
You could go a step further, and decide that steamed veggies will be the first course of dinner, so you fill up on nutritious food and have less room in your stomach left over for lasagna or dessert. This is a little bit bigger change, but it’s doable. You're not denying yourself lasagna or dessert, you're just arranging the meal in such a way that you're eating the "good stuff" first.
Doesn’t that seem easier?
Of course, you still have a dozen other small changes to make. But you’ll make them after eating veggies first has become an automatic habit. Maybe that takes a couple of weeks. Maybe it takes longer.
Once it seems normal to start dinner with a helping of vegetables, then you can add another small step, like swapping your afternoon M&Ms for a healthier snack, or taking a multivitamin, or going for a walk after lunch.
True, the incremental approach to change does take longer. But when change happens gradually, it's also more likely to stick, because smaller changes require less motivation and are less disruptive to your current routine.
So the Hare does occasionally beat the Tortoise—when the Hare is seriously motivated. But the rest of the time, the Tortoise wins the race.
What would you most like to change about your life?
What small change could you make right now that would get you started on the path to that larger change?
