No Sweat: How the Simple Science of Motivation Can Bring You a Lifetime of Fitness
258
No Sweat: How the Simple Science of Motivation Can Bring You a Lifetime of Fitness
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Overview
Do you secretly hate exercising? Struggle to stick with a program? Millions of people try and fail to stay fit. But what if "exercising" is the real problem, not you?
Motivation scientist and behavior expert Michelle Segar?translates years of research on exercise and motivation into a simple four-point program that will empower you to break the cycle of exercise failure once and for all.
You'll discover why you should forget about willpower and stop gritting your teeth through workouts you hate. Instead, you'll become motivated from the inside out and start to crave physical activity.
In No Sweat, Segar will help you find:
- A step-by-step program for staying encouraged to exercise
- Pleasure in physical activity
- Realistic ways to fit fitness into your life
The success of the clients Segar has coached testifies to the power of her program. Their stories punctuate the book, entertaining and emboldening you to break the cycle of exercise failure once and for all.
Practical, proven, and loaded with inspiring stories, No Sweat makes getting fit easier--and more fun--than you ever imagined. Get ready to embrace an active lifestyle that you'll love!
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780814434864 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins Christian Publishing |
| Publication date: | 08/22/2023 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 258 |
| Sales rank: | 444,056 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
No Sweat
How the Simple Science of Motivation Can Bring You a Lifetime of Fitness
By Michelle Segar
AMACOM
Copyright © 2015 Michelle SegarAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8144-3486-4
CHAPTER 1
It's Not About the Sweat
WHEN MARCIA CALLED ME, SHE WAS AT HER WIT'S END. NOW IN HER mid-fifties, she'd been carrying around excess weight for thirty years, ever since she'd given birth to her first child. "I've tried everything," she told me, "eating special foods, fasting, diet plans from my doctor, jogging, the treadmill at the gym ... Nothing works. I can't seem to lose weight for more than a few months at a time, and then it comes back again. I'm calling you because I know your specialty is motivation. And I need to be motivated!"
"Actually," I said, "you sound incredibly motivated. Maybe too motivated." I knew this would get her attention.
"How can you say I'm motivated when I'm five dress sizes bigger than I should be?" she asked. I could hear the annoyance in her voice, but I also heard the anxious pressure of should driving her frustration. She should eat less, be thinner, work out more, take care of her health
... Like so many of us, Marcia had come to think of food and physical movement not as the life essentials they are but as "diet" and "exercise"—a type of medicine prescribed in doses of portion sizes and reps we have to "take" or "do" to lose weight and prevent disease. But when eating and moving become something we should do or have to do rather than something we want to do, this undermines motivation and participation big time. After all, who looks forward to "taking her medicine"?
"Marcia," I said, "I'm going to ask you to do something, and I think it will be incredibly hard for you. But I want you to at least consider it." I didn't have to wait for her response.
"I'll do anything!" she replied, sounding ready to jump off a cliff if that's what I suggested. "Just give me a plan, a program—anything. I swear I'll follow it to a T."
"Good," I said. "I know you don't have any pressing health problems, so here's what I want you to do: I want you to stop dieting and get off that treadmill."
"And do what?" she asked.
"How about just living your life?" I responded. "How about deciding that it's okay to forget about dieting? Instead of watching calories and driving yourself to sweat, you'll begin enjoying your life by being as physically engaged in it as possible. How does that sound?"
"That sounds great, I guess," Marcia admitted. "But I'm not really sure what you mean by being physically engaged. And don't I have to sweat to get the benefit? Or else why do it? Honestly, I've tried just as many exercise plans as diets, and I couldn't stick with any of them. I fail with exercise too."
"That's not a problem. I'm not going to ask you to exercise either."
"What?!" Marcia sputtered. I think she thought I was crazy. I knew that this statement must have sounded downright insane coming from a motivation coach who specializes in getting people to become physically active.
"The idea of exercise has become too much of a synonym for punishment," I continued. "You hear the word exercise and immediately think that if you're not drenched in sweat and gutting it out on some kind of complicated gym equipment for at least an hour a day every day, you're failing at it."
This hit home with Marcia. "Yes! Exactly! I can't stand going to the gym. First, it's boring. I hate those machines and dragging myself through classes with perky instructors. Plus I'm surrounded by skinny young women who run on those treadmills as though they're outracing the bulls at Pamplona. It's so depressing!"
"So why not move your body in ways that feel good to you instead?" The complete silence on the other end of the phone told me that Marcia had never stopped to consider this idea before. Maybe you haven't either, so let's talk about it right now.
I'm guessing that you picked up this book because, for the first or fiftieth time, you've gotten up your resolve to start exercising, watch what you eat, get in better shape, and improve your overall health. I really hope you weren't looking for another standard diet or exercise plan. Because just as I explained to Marcia, I'm asking you to begin by doing just the opposite: Take a break. Give yourself some breathing room to consider where your usual approach to fitness and health has taken you.
The Health and Fitness Message Isn't Working
Why are so many of us on a diet and exercise treadmill, continually losing ground and gaining pounds? It's not as if we don't want to succeed at our fitness attempts. Each year, millions of Americans go on a diet, spending billions of dollars of their hard-earned cash on weight loss. This drive for perfection is fueled by an image-obsessed culture that tells us we need to be more attractive and lose weight no matter what we weigh.
We hear the same health messages over and over: We're overweight. We eat too much junk. We don't exercise enough. We need to lower our blood pressure and cholesterol. We have to shed some pounds and buff up. If we don't heed this advice, we increase our risk of cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and other illnesses. Plus, our poor health is costing us money and taxing our businesses and healthcare system. We hear these messages and others like them from our doctors, from marketers, from the news media, and even from the First Lady of the United States. And we can't argue with the underlying truth: We really would be better served if we got off the couch on a regular basis. We really do want to be healthy and fit.
So where are we going wrong? Why aren't we getting the message? As a researcher and expert on behavioral sustainability, I have spent twenty years studying these and related questions, and the truth of the matter is this: We are getting the message. We just aren't very motivated by it.
In 1994, I was working toward my first master's degree in the Kinesiology, the study of human movement. (I would continue on to earn a second master's degree in Health Behavior/Health Education and a Ph.D. in Psychology.) As part of my program, my colleagues and I conducted a study to see whether ten weeks of exercise would decrease anxiety and depression among a group of breast cancer survivors.2
We split the participants into two groups, one that exercised and a control group that did not exercise. The results were as we expected: The survivors who exercised showed significantly lower levels of both depression and anxiety than the control group. I thought that was the end of the story until the participants came back three months later for follow-up focus groups. Not surprisingly, all of them talked about how good exercise had been for their health. But when we asked if they were still exercising, nearly all of them said no. When their commitment to the study ended, so did their commitment to exercise. I was stunned—they had all reported having such good experiences with exercise. When I asked why they had stopped, they all gave the same basic reason: We had to get back to living our lives, working, taking care of the kids and our parents ... Despite what they'd been through, 99 percent of the participants didn't feel compelled to continue taking care of themselves once the crisis was over. It was a shocking finding. I mean, if facing death and surviving serious illness aren't motivation enough to take better care of yourself, what is? I wanted desperately to find out.
Doing What You Enjoy Is a Better Motivator for Exercising—and It Works
Since then, I've dedicated my career to understanding the true barriers to lifelong self-care. And here's what I've found: Sensible goals or reasons for lifestyle changes—such as "preventing disease," "better health," or "weight loss"—sound great, but they exist in some vague future. We burn out long before we actually get there because the promise of a brighter day sometime down the road doesn't make us happy right now.
Science supports this big time. As you'll learn in this book, research shows that human beings are hardwired to choose immediate gratification over benefits we have to wait to receive. Logic doesn't motivate us—emotions do. But there is real science behind the idea that moving our bodies changes our brains in ways that lead to happiness and much more. The benefits that research shows for regular exercise are truly astounding: more energy, better sleep, less stress, less depression, enhanced mood, improved memory, less anxiety, better sex life, higher life satisfaction, more creativity, and better well-being overall.
As a scientist, educator, and motivation and self-care coach, I work with all sorts of people—some thin, some heavy, some very heavy, some healthy, some living with chronic illness. Most of my clients are women, but I've worked with men as well. And unlikely as it sounds, I've found an accessible no-cost solution that guides people to stay physically active, consistently take care of their bodies, have more energy, and feel better about themselves and their lives: understanding how to choose and enjoy daily movement, of almost any kind, as long as it makes them feel good. That's it? Yes.
I've been doing research on the messages and methods of sustainable behavior change, and teaching the system on which this book is based, for almost twenty years. I've delivered the system to individual clients around the world in person, on the phone, and via Skype. I've brought it to people through hospitals and community centers, training health and wellness professionals globally. I've consulted with international corporations on their fitness apps, customer experience, and wellness programming. And I've advised healthcare companies in using my methods to improve patient behavioral sustainability, an essential element to achieve better health in people who are well or live with chronic illness.
Thanks to funding from a National Institutes of Health grant, I was able to study my program's long-term effects. The failure rate of most physical activity programs is well known: In general, most people drop out only six months after starting. By contrast, on average, ten months after my program ended, the majority of participants sustained an average 65 percent increase in physical activity (compared to baseline).3 I am very passionate about my work, but it's worth noting that I have trained others to teach it, so its success rate is not just the result of my enthusiasm for it.
One key is the realization that reaping the benefits of physical activity is not just about the sweat: An almost infinite variety of physical movement choices and intensities will work just as well, or better, than a strict regimen of intense workouts—especially when people have chosen activities they actually enjoy doing. This statement may seem radical to you. But in fact, it is right in line with the most recent physical activity recommendations and the latest scientific findings:
* Life-centered activities such as house cleaning, gardening, and walking "count," and even just sitting less can be of benefit.
* The scientific community has given us the green light to accumulate the physical activity we do throughout our day instead of having to do it all at once.
* Our movement intensity does not have to be "vigorous" (or very hard to do) or make us sweat to "count."
As a behavioral sustainability researcher and self-care coach, I know that helping people understand these guidelines—and believe that they are true!—is crucial to helping them create physically active lifestyles that they can and want to sustain.
My coaching clients are smart people who come to me for a variety of reasons: frustration over their inability to lose weight; a gym membership that started with a firm intention to stick to a program and ended with months of paying for a membership they never use; a need to get fit because of a pressing health concern; or feeling ready to go from just trying to survive every day to genuinely thriving. They are sick and tired of short-term, one-size-fits-all solutions that preach losing weight as the key goal and never deliver results that stick. They want a new approach to self-care, well-being, health, and fitness that understands and treats them as a whole person. And, of course, they want it to work.
An Individualized Program That Changes Lives
I know it seems impossible, given the number of times you tried yet another exercise or diet plan only to watch it fall by the wayside, but my clients actually make a 180-degree turnaround in four to six weeks, and they rarely if ever change direction again. I know, because I make it a practice to follow up. When I check in with former clients years and even decades after we stopped working together, I hear the term "life-changing" over and over again. In fact, more than one of my clients has exclaimed at some point in our process of working together, "I thought this was about me learning how to get healthy and fit. But it's really about my life." And, I have to admit, they're right. Because face it—your health and well-being don't exist in a vacuum but in the context of your busy, crazy, complex, unpredictable day-today life.
My program is based on your desire to make self-care a priority and a good fit with your life. That's why there is nothing you "should" do; no one will stand over you to tell you "what" to do or how long or hard to do it. You don't need to buy special outfits or equipment, and you can start right where you are—in your office, your kitchen, your backyard, your neighborhood. There's only one basic instruction: Take any and every opportunity to move, in any way possible, at whatever speed you like, for any amount of time. Do what makes you feel good; stop doing what makes you feel bad. We'll talk about the details as we go along.
Your MAPS and How to Use Them
This no-strict-diet, no-do-it-till-it-burns workout attitude opens up an entirely new way to think about fitness and health that will radically transform your beliefs about what's possible, as well as your approach to your own self-care. It also requires you to start on a journey to a new way of thinking about things. That requires the right map—or, in this case, MAPS, which is how my program is structured. APS stands for Meaning, Awareness, Permission, and Strategy. We'll get to that in a moment.
The old maps you've tried to follow to fitness and health are very likely the ones you've been sold by the diet and exercise industry, and they likely haven't led you to physical activity that you enjoy or stay motivated to do. The MAPS I have developed will help you learn how to enjoy the benefits of daily physical movement every day, for life. MAPS is a flexible, safe, science-based approach to exercise and self-care that you can tailor to your own changing needs across a day, a week, and a lifetime.
The chapters in the first three parts of this book (Meaning, Awareness, and Permission) are the MAP that guides you on the path from where you are now to a new horizon—successfully incorporating physical movement and self-care into your life so you can feel great and fuel what matters most. You'll use the chapters in the final part (Strategy) to guide your next steps as you move forward on this new path each day, negotiating life's challenges and gifts with resilience and confidence, sustaining self-care for a lifetime.
Throughout the book—starting in this chapter—are It's Your Move exercises that ask you to reflect on your personal relationship with the material you're reading. Please approach these exercises in the way that works best for you. Although you may choose to write your answers directly in the book, some of the later questions call for more space than can be included here. I suggest keeping all of your responses in a separate notebook or in a special file in your laptop or tablet.
Here's a quick tour of the territory we'll cover:
* Meaning. We often don't give thought to what something means to us, yet everything in our lives is symbolic and holds a personal significance that affects how we feel about it, how we approach it, and how it motivates us. The chapters in this part will help you uncover your hidden expectations, the reasons that set you up for short-term results, and will help you understand that you can change a Meaning that leads to failure into a Meaning that motivates you to move.
* Awareness. What's really been keeping you from staying motivated? What activities fuel you, make you feel great, give you energy, and help restore you? The chapters in this part will give you Awareness of the realities of physical exercise, how you make decisions, how motivation works, and how to convert your Meaning of exercise from a chore into a gift. You'll also become cognizant of new science on what counts and on how easy and fun it actually is to fit and negotiate feel-good physical activities into your daily life. The It's Your Move! Game will also help you discover the hidden opportunities to move that are hiding in plain sight. You'll learn how to gift yourself with movement in many new ways!
(Continues...)
Excerpted from No Sweat by Michelle Segar. Copyright © 2015 Michelle Segar. Excerpted by permission of AMACOM.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
LIST OF FIGURES, xiii,PREFACE, xv,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, xix,
A NOTE TO HEALTH PROFESSIONALS, xxi,
CHAPTER 1. It's Not about the Sweat, 1,
PART I. MEANING,
CHAPTER 2. Escaping the Vicious Cycle of Failure, 19,
CHAPTER 3. Motivation from the Inside Out, 34,
PART II. AWARENESS,
CHAPTER 4. Exorcising Exercise, 55,
CHAPTER 5. Count Everything and Choose to Move!, 73,
CHAPTER 6. From a Chore to a Gift, 99,
PART III. PERMISSION,
CHAPTER 7. Permission to Prioritize Self-Care, 123,
CHAPTER 8. What Sustains Us, We Sustain, 149,
PART IV. STRATEGY,
CHAPTER 9. Six Big Ideas for Lifelong Sustainability, 173,
CHAPTER 10. Sustainability Training, 186,
EPILOGUE: Changing Your Beliefs, Changing Your Behavior, Changing Your Life, 217,
ENDNOTES, 225,
INDEX, 237,
ABOUT THE AUTHOR, 245,
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