It’s been about a month since Weight Loss Boss hit the bookstores.  I’ve spent the last month (and the month before that) shamelessly seeking my own shallow glory by promoting it.  My only hope is that those who have  read the book have found some use in it despite my nefarious, personal goals of self-aggrandizement.  There is a little more book promotion coming up, but at this point, it’s mostly about word-of-mouth buzz for future sales.  On a more serious note, I am hopeful that it ultimately sells enough copies so that the proceeds can give the designated beneficiary, Share Our Strength, a nice shot in the arm.

Having spent SO MUCH time talking about my book, it occurs that it might now be time to talk about someone else’s book.  What follows is less of a review and more of a display of a man crush on another  much more capable writer.  Just as I had put the finishing touches on Weight Loss Boss and sent it off to the printer, an interesting book hit the bookstores like a minor thunderstorm.  The book was “The Power of Habit”, by Charles Duhigg, a NY Times reporter.  I first learned about it by reading an excerpt of it in the NY Times Sunday Magazine, and I found myself completely taken in.  The book then came out, and I completely devoured it.  It was one of the first books I familiary with that fully explains the concept of a habit in an accessible and useful way.  In fact, my only regret about Duhigg’s book is that it didn’t come out sooner, which would have allowed me to plagerize the crap out of it.  Such are the cruel twists of fate.

It is impossible to think about a successful weight loss journey without spending most of it thinking about habits and routines.  The simple truth of our daily lives is that despite our flurry of activity, most of us are not carefully thinking through every single little thing we do with each passing minute.  That’s a good thing, because if we did, we would surely spiral into complete insanity.  In fact most of decisions throughout the day really aren’t decisions at all.  We are on auto-pilot.  If we are all in fact on auto-pilot, it’s only reasonable to ask who programmed the auto-pilot software and where exactly is it taking us?

The science of habits and what they actually are is a relatively more recent phenomena.  There has been a ton of fascinating research taking place over the past 10 to 15 years by some really smart folks at universities that never would have accepted me (Stanford, MIT, etc.).  Many of you know that I am a huge fan of the work of Stanford researcher B.J. Fogg and his work with technology and the process of establishing what he calls “Tiny Habits”.  While Charles Duhigg is not a scientist, he is a pretty thorough researcher (the best journalists are), and he dove into this nascent research sector with reckless abandon.  What I found particularly powerful and useful about his book was the manner in which he illuminated and simplified a lot of complex science into some pretty easily grasped constructs.

To understand and appreciate a habit, examples are pretty helpful.  Duhigg references the familiar research of a mouse being put into a maze where it has to figure out where to find the cheese.  Apparently, researchers found some way of attaching a brain scanning contraption to the little mouse’s head (the visual of this alone is almost worth the price of admission).  The first X times coursing through the maze, the little mouse brain is firing on all circuits while it tries to problem solve it’s way through the maze to get its reward du fromage.  After Y times, the mouse fully gets the hang of the course.  After a buzzer cues him to to start, he then blazes through the maze, and quickly captures his prize.  What is fascinating is that when he gets to this point of maze-skill, his brain is barely registering anything in his brain measuring helmet.  The mouse is exerting literally no mental activity.  The complex set of commands and decisions necessary to navigate the maze have literally become a single executable command.  Navigating the maze becomes an automatic routine that allows his brain to think about other more interesting things, such as “Where can I find a girl mouse in this big crazy maze?”.  For you fellow nerds, it’s almost as though a habit is our brain’s version of obect oriented programming.  The habit becomes an easily accessed programming routine that then sits in our library of other habits.

Duhigg goes on to describe experiments with people suffering brain damage in their cerberal cortext (i.e., the top of the brain) who can still perform basic skills like brushing their teeth, talking, and doing their routine 1 mile walk despite the fact that they have lost virtually all of their short term memory.  Apparently, our habits get pushed down to the stem of our brain in the basil ganglia.  The important point is that habits literally live in a different part of our brain, separated from the rest of our mental decision making apparatus.

All of this is very fine and interesting, but of more use is his description of the process of creating a new habit as well as the possibility of dispelling an undesirable habit.  What I found incredibly helpful was his simple diagram of showing how a habit gets formed:

1. There needs to be some sort of Cue
2. The Cue is followed by a series of steps that constitute a Routine
3. There is a Reward at the end of the Routine

All three elements are necessary for a new habit to be created.  All three elements can be recognized to identify a crummy habit.  For example, Duhigg argues that the first key in getting rid of a bad habit is to identify it’s cue.  He uses the example of a mid-afternoon desire to go to the office cafeteria and grab a cookie.  It’s an automatic response that happens at the same time each day.  He then spends time trying to figure out exactly what kind of reward his brain is seeking the causes him to follow this cookie eating routine.  He came to the conclusion that the reward was a desire he had to get away from his desk and spend some time BS’ing with colleagues.  Through his diagnosis, he was able to replace the routine of eating a cookie with a different routine that allowed him to get the same reward thereby allowing him to kick his afternoon cookie problem.

Another useful example is the very familiar process of brushing our teeth.  Duhigg gives a fascinating history of how a very smart marketer created the habit of brushing our teeth as a way of peddling a lot of toothpaste.  In this example, the cue can be “it’s nightime”.  The routine is all of the steps associated with brushing our teeth.  The reward is having minty fresh breath that does not cause us to peel the paint off of walls or force our spouse to vomit after we kiss them.  The reward of minty fresh breath was apparently strong enough that our brains decided it was worth it to adopt the routine and create a baked habit.

One of my most familiar personal examples of this is my morning workout.  What I realized in reading Duhigg’s book was that I followed his habit path chapter and verse:

• My cue:  the 5 AM alarm clock (that’s an easy one)
• My routine:  all gym clothes and diet Red Bull put out the night before.  When I wake up, I quickly blast through email, check headlines, etc.  I then jump into the car, and hit the gym.  Somewhere in there I almost always put my gym clothes on.
• My reward:  started with getting to listen to my cheesey music as loud as a I could through my headphones.  Now it’s the reward of vaguely looking like someone who goes to the gym every day.  Don’t knock the power of vanity!

As I always tell people, working out every day is not a function of discipline for me.  It’s just a routine.  It’s a habit.

When I think about where I am today in navigating my daily life, my most important support system has been the inventory of helpful habits I have built up over the past 10 years.  I would have had absolutely no chance at keeping my weight off where it not for those habits and routines.  I would argue that habits and routines are simply the only chance we have to consistently making healthy decisions in a food environment that wants us to make crummy decisions.  The reason for this is simple:  a habit is not a decision at all.  It’s autopilot, and that is a powerful and mighty tool.

Given the central role that habits play in any successful long term weight loss effort, how can I not recommend a book that dedicates itself to that very topic.  As an added perk, Duhigg is also a great writer and story teller, so its entertaining/fascinating to boot.

Here is the link to Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Power-Habit-What-Business/dp/1400069289

Cheers,

Dave