What are habits and why do we need them?
Habits make you who you are. Building good new habits is the key to making lasting lifestyle changes that will help you live a happier, healthier, and longer life. However, if you persist with bad habits, they can hold you back from achieving your goals and making a real difference.
In this blog post, we'll take a look at the types of habits you should change, break, and adopt to improve your health, especially your blood sugar levels, and thus your overall health and well-being. We'll also look at how you can successfully develop new habits and make new behaviors seem so natural that they become practically automatic.
What kinds of habits should I try to change?
There are four key lifestyle areas—or pillars—that can directly impact your overall health and fitness. These four pillars are: healthy eating, exercise, sleep, and stress management or mindfulness.
We can measure the overall impact of lifestyle on our health and fitness by monitoring blood glucose levels, which is an important biomarker and indicator of metabolic health .
What habits do you already have related to these four pillars? Do you sleep 7-8 hours a night? Do you practice mindfulness to manage stress at home or at work? Do you drink alcohol regularly? And if you work from home, do you remember to go outside and take a walk in the morning before you sit down at your computer or in the evening before you go to bed?
Each of these habits can have a direct impact on your overall health, which can be seen in your blood sugar levels. In the next section, we'll take a look at five small but surprisingly effective habits you can adopt to significantly improve your overall health and stabilize your blood sugar .
6 bad habits you should break now (and what you can do instead)
As we saw above, many of the decisions we make daily have a direct impact on our blood sugar levels and thus our metabolic health. Our lifestyle (exercise, sleep, stress, and diet) is one of the most important levers when it comes to healthy habits. The good news, however, is that even small changes can have a big impact. So try adopting the following habits and swapping them for new ones, and you'll see how your well-being improves in a short time.
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Drink orange juice for breakfast
You might think orange juice is a healthy option, but it actually leads to a lot of sugar in the morning. Try eating a whole piece of fruit if you feel like it. Whole fruit contains much more fiber than blended fruit in juice form . Fiber helps regulate the body's sugar metabolism and helps keep hunger and blood sugar under control.
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Snacking on chocolate
If you eat sugary snacks in the middle of the day, your blood sugar levels are more likely to spike. Try replacing them with a savory snack to avoid this. If you don't want to give up sweet treats, make it a habit to always eat them as dessert after a meal. The order in which we eat is crucial for reducing blood sugar spikes and thus controlling cravings .
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Stress while eating
Have you ever caught yourself working while eating? Checking a few emails or working on a presentation? This can impair nutrient absorption, and we tend to eat faster and more when we're not paying attention. Take your time with your meal. So try to enjoy your food consciously and mindfully.
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The nap after eating
If you've just eaten a really heavy meal, the only thing you probably want to do is curl up on the couch and scroll through your phone or sleep while digesting your food. This is one of the worst habits for dealing with high blood sugar levels after a meal. Get into the habit of taking a short 10- to 15-minute walk or doing some light exercise after eating. This will help your body's cells absorb the excess glucose in your bloodstream and prevent it from rising.
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Eat bread and butter as a starter
As we mentioned earlier, the order in which you eat your meals is very important for how your body reacts to a spike in blood sugar. Starting a meal with bread and butter is one of the worst things you can do to your body! Instead, get into the habit of starting your meal with a light green salad, preferably with an apple cider vinegar dressing, to keep your blood sugar levels low.
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Intense training or late eating before bedtime
Maybe you prefer to exercise in the evening rather than in the morning, but if you exercise too intensely, you risk disrupting your sleep at night. You might also tend to eat later in the evening and too close to bedtime. Both of these can affect your sleep quality. Poor sleep is bad for your blood sugar levels, as your body needs this time to rest and recover. Try to get into the habit of exercising in the morning. If you still feel like doing something before bed, try some light stretching or yoga. Also, make sure you eat your last meal at least 2-3 hours before bedtime.
How long does it take to change a habit
To make something a habit, you have to consistently strive for a new behavior until it feels so natural and automatic that you don't even have to think about it anymore. Each of the habits listed above should be fairly easy to adopt, but successfully turning them into habits is a matter of time.
It can take between 2 and 6 months for a new behavior to become a habit, but most things should become automatic within the third month of becoming a habit.
This means that morning workouts might feel a little strange or unnatural for the first two months, but don't worry. Stick with it, and by the third month, you'll be able to do them with your eyes closed (almost)!
If you try to form a new habit but can't seem to get it right, don't beat yourself up. Depending on how drastic the change is compared to your usual routine, it may take quite a while for it to become second nature. Don't worry if you slip up now and then. Just remember why you're trying to make this change and stick with it!
In the next section, we will see how we can internalize new habits more easily with a few tricks.
How to establish new habits
Build on existing habits
The key to forming a new habit is leveraging existing habits. This means building your new habit on top of an existing one. Many of us have the habit of starting the day with a nice warm cup of coffee. This can be a great opportunity to take 10 minutes to practice mindfulness , stretch, or even learn something new!
Start small and don't make it too difficult
Introduce your new habit in small steps, avoiding pushing yourself too hard or too quickly. If you push yourself too hard your first time at the gym, you risk injuring yourself and not being able to continue until you've recovered. This will demotivate you and make your goals seem far away.
If you want to make it a habit to go to the gym 4-5 times a week, you don't have to do a tough workout every time. Just set your first goal to show up every day, maybe do a light jog on the treadmill, shower, and get on with your day. Once going to the gym every day has become a habit, you can focus on increasing the intensity of your workouts. Also, consider whether it might be worth changing the easy things first before taking on a more challenging routine. If you haven't made going to the gym a habit at all, a really good goal to start with just going once a week to get used to regular visits.
Consistency is the key to success
Since it takes several months for a new behavior to become a habit, it's important that you make a consistent effort to do it whenever you can. This means implementing your new habits and resolutions at regular intervals. Depending on your goal, there are probably new things you want to do daily (e.g., practicing mindfulness before bed) or 2-3 times a week (e.g., going to the gym). Or there might even be things you want to do multiple times a day (e.g., taking a 10-minute walk after every meal). Set specific times or days to do these habits and enter them in your calendar. Consistency is key to sticking with a new habit.
Make it simple - preparation is everything
Try to reduce the number of limiting factors that might prevent you from successfully implementing a new habit. What are the pain points you don't like? If you want to go to the gym every morning, pack your gym bag the night before and leave it by your door. This means you're asking your body to simply get up in the foggy morning hours, grab your bag, and go. Some people even sleep in their running clothes so they only have to put on their shoes before they can go for a run in the morning.
Take responsibility for yourself & seek support
Talk to a good friend about your goals and ask them to support you or work with you to achieve them . It may be enough for your friend to simply check in with you now and then to make sure you're continuing to work toward your goal and keep up the good work. When we share the motivation to adopt a new habit with a friend, we're much more likely to succeed.
Reward yourself for success
Let's face it, humans are pretty impressionable creatures. We're much more likely to do something if we know there's an immediate reward attached. If you reach your daily exercise goal, binge on your favorite TV show. Or if you want to go to bed before 10:30 p.m. every night, make yourself a nice warm herbal tea at 10 p.m. as a reward for being on time. These simple rewards help carry your body through the period when a new habit still feels foreign, unfamiliar, and unnatural, until it becomes something you do automatically.
Visualize your progress
There are many ways to monitor and visualize your progress when implementing new habits. Seeing this will motivate you and make you keep going naturally. When it comes to your health, it's not always easy to measure results. Sure, you can check your weight or count how often you exercise. However, that alone doesn't give you a comprehensive picture of your health status.
For example, if you want to lose weight , lose some fat, and boost your metabolism, you might start strength training. After a while, you'll get frustrated because the scale still isn't showing any less weight (because you're not only losing fat, but also building muscle), but you'll already feel much better. Blood glucose monitoring can be a great tool to help you measure and visualize these and other positive changes. This way, you can see in real time how your new habits around sleep, exercise, nutrition, and stress management are directly impacting your metabolism and health . This can help you stick with it and automatically improve your lifestyle.
80% of Hello Inside users were able to easily improve their habits and develop new, healthy habits in a short period of time. All by using the app in combination with the CGM sensor for blood glucose monitoring. Ready to get started?
