Inside the Mind of a Habit Former

Ten things I’ve learned from the past few months of developing a new habit

Photo by Lala Azizli on Unsplash

James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, and a speaker, once said in this article, “New goals don’t deliver new results. New lifestyles do. And a lifestyle is not an outcome, it is a process. It is a series of habits.”

Bad habits are easy to form and hard to eliminate. I experienced it firsthand a few years ago, when I wrote about my attempt at losing weight here. At the time, I was in my mid-thirties with two children, and never completely lost the weight I gained with my second baby. Plus, I’d come to the realization that my lifestyle choices (snacking in the afternoon on chips, too much coffee, etc.) was contributing to a slight weight gain, which I felt uncomfortable acknowledging.

As much as I’d like to tell you that my story ends there — that I somehow figured out the magic solution to continuing my journey towards being fit, I did not figure it out, and my story came to a halt for several years…until the pandemic hit.

We can blame the pandemic for creating major upheaval in our lives, but one thing that it did for me was allow me to reflect upon my life choices. Suddenly, I was without a job. And suddenly, I realized that I did not want to emerge from this darkness of the…