Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later, and now it’s come down to this. As if starting a new diet and sticking with it isn’t usually hard enough, now it’s time to talk about the “E” word. I know, I know, exercise is about as much fun as a root canal, right? Not so fast! Perhaps we’ve all been mislead? Maybe there’s a better strategy for exercise, just like there is for starting a diet. In fact, there is! But before I jump into this, I want to put exercise in its proper context.

Exercise or die!

Years ago, when I was a kid, I had a neighbor across the street who had a close call that really shook him up. Being in his mid-40s, suddenly realizing that years of bad eating and lack of exercise had finally caught up with him was quite unnerving, especially when his heart troubles began. It’s not something you take lightly. After a heart attack, his doctor warned that if he didn’t change his ways–eat healthier, start getting regular exercise, and drop 50 pounds –he was going to die (sooner rather than later).

Over the next several months, he was seen walking up and down the block a couple times every day. Slowly, but surely, he started losing weight, looking healthier, and feeling better than ever. Unfortunately, it took a threat to his life, in the form of a heart attack, to motivate him to get healthy. But why are we like that? Why does it take facing some kind of life-threatening penalty before we miraculously find the motivation to exercise and get healthy?

Before I introduce the easiest way (ever!) to start a diet and stay on it, I want to make something very clear. Your success in sticking to a diet to lose weight depends on how easy it is to keep yourself eating more healthy foods than unhealthy foods. That’s common sense, right? But inevitably, you’re going to face weak moments where you could give in to temptation and eat something you shouldn’t. But why does this happen?

The path of least resistance

Imagine a river that’s near the epicenter of an earthquake. Boulders, dirt, and debris shift and completely fill up a section of the river. With the river blocked, the water can’t follow its normal path and is diverted in a different direction. The water naturally follows the contours of the earth that have the fewest obstructions. When faced with the decision to eat healthy or eat junk food, we often give in and eat the junk food. We follow the path of least resistance and eat the foods we’re most used to eating. We have the least resistance to foods that are familiar to us. Likewise, we have the most resistance to any sudden changes in our normal eating patterns.

Seriously, you’re not going to do anything that you don’t want to do. So let’s not pretend you’re excited about going on a diet and starting to exercise if you’re not. Before you start any kind of diet and exercise program, it’s important to start with a little honesty. Otherwise, everything you do, going forward, is on shaky ground. Not a good place to start.

Simple Steps to a Swimsuit Body

Ah…nope. That’s not what this is about. And if that’s the only reason you’re reading this, you may as well move along. The absolute best reason in the known universe to start eating better and exercising is for the long-term health benefits. But don’t freak out here, there are short-term benefits and one of them is losing weight. I’ll talk about that in this series but our priority is to establish a reason for getting healthy other than just because of swimsuit season. The more solid the reason for starting, the more likely you’ll stick with it. So this is very important.

“Fun can obviously change behavior for the better.” This is Volkswagen’s theory about changing behavior and this video is a great example of how they tested and proved their theory. The people at Volkswagen call this “The Fun Theory“

Most people struggle to get exercise because it’s hard work. We’ve all heard that it’s better to take the stairs instead of the elevator or escalator, but let’s face it, if it were easy, everybody would be doing it. You can see in this video, there was a big motivation for taking the stairs–it was fun. For many of the people who use this Odenplan plaza metro station in Stockholm, Sweden, the escalator got most of the traffic until they installed musical piano keys to the stairs. Then the stairs got 66% of the foot traffic.

Pain and pleasure are the two key ways to change behavior and increase motivation. But there is an art to balancing the two. Lasting behavior change must honor this balance. If the scale tips too heavily to one side, it ceases to be effective. If the music staircase would have been longer or at a steeper pitch, there’s a good chance that people would have still used the escalator instead. But this project was perfectly balanced: not too much effort (pain) required to walk up the stairs, and it was fun (pleasure) to play the keys with every step.

Kudos to Volkswagen for their innovation and emphasis on using fun to change behavior. I’ll dig deeper into The Fun Theory later.