Healthy Habits Suck Read online

  “Healthy Habits Suck is the right companion on a journey toward eating, sleeping, and living well. This book is solidly grounded in research and years of practical experience bringing a refreshing ‘what works’ attitude. You will find accessible activities, compelling descriptions, and profoundly relatable insights into living a healthier life. If you’re struggling to make healthy lifestyle changes, try this radically new approach to living well.”

  —Timothy Gordon, MSW, RSW, award-winning coauthor of The ACT Approach and Mindful Yoga-Based Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

  “So many of us fail again and again to keep up the healthy eating or exercise goals we set for ourselves. In this readable, realistic, and honest book, Lee-Baggley combines cutting-edge behavioral science, professional (and personal) experience, and usable techniques to show us how we can make the changes that matter to us, and make them stick. I think this book will help many of my clients: I KNOW it will help me!”

  —Ray Owen, DClinPsychol, consultant clinical and health psychologist (National Health Service, England), and author of Living with the Enemy

  “Healthy Habits Suck is a breath of fresh air and a much-needed compassionate perspective on the difficulties of making lifestyle changes. Lee-Baggley writes with the perfect blend of easy-to-understand science, illustrative clinical examples, and personal experience to help the reader change their perspective on what it means to be healthy, and the best ways to pursue health goals.”

  —Jason Lillis, PhD, coauthor of The Diet Trap, and assistant professor at the Brown University Medical School

  “The central premise of this book is that most health behaviors go against our natural instincts (apple pie will always taste better than apples). So, how do you get yourself to do them? Here, Lee-Baggley provides a key insight: rather than linking health behaviors to specific goals like ‘losing weight,’ sustained change happens when we link these behaviors to a deeply felt value like ‘maintaining my independence.’ The book is an easy read, with real-life case studies and strategies on how to approach decision points and engage in mindfulness and self-compassion. A good read for anyone seeking to change their behaviors.”

  —Arya M. Sharma, MD, professor of medicine at the University of Alberta, Edmonton; and founder of Obesity Canada

  “Healthy Habits Suck is a laugh-out-loud introduction to the passengers on your bus who hijack your efforts to pursue healthy habits. How do we live with our caveman brain’s instincts in the modern world? Lee-Baggley has a goal: to help you live a more meaningful, purposeful, and vibrant life through emotion-focused coping strategies to manage your health behaviors—even when you don’t want to.”

  —Denise Campbell-Scherer, MD, PhD, professor in the department of family medicine, and associate dean of the lifelong learning and physician learning program at the University of Alberta, Edmonton

  “This is one of the most useful and important books I have read for some time. The skills you will learn from this book are based on the latest theories and research in the fields of psychology, health, and behavior change. The book will be especially useful to anyone interested in becoming more active, eating better, (re)engaging with a hobby, or improving their health in other ways. But I would also recommend this book if you’d like to become clearer about your personal values, or if you want to learn how to find more meaning and purpose in your daily life.”

  —Paul Flaxman, PhD, reader in the department of psychology at City, University of London; and coauthor of The Mindful and Effective Employee

  “Lee-Baggley helps us appreciate our very human affinity for adopting and practicing poor health habits, year after year. Then, she provides practical strategies for humans to use to choose behaviors that promote health, one moment at a time. This little book helped me take on a small, important, and difficult change in my life because I want to live and love and be of service to others as long as I can. Thank you, Dayna Lee-Baggley, for sharing your stories and your wisdom with us!”

  —Patricia Robinson, PhD, coauthor of The Mindfulness and Acceptance Workbook for Depression

  Publisher’s Note

  This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering psychological, financial, legal, or other professional services. If expert assistance or counseling is needed, the services of a competent professional should be sought.

  Distributed in Canada by Raincoast Books

  Copyright © 2019 by Dayna Lee-Baggley

  New Harbinger Publications, Inc.

  5674 Shattuck Avenue

  Oakland, CA 94609

  www.newharbinger.com

  Cover design by Sara Christian

  Acquired by Elizabeth Hollis-Hansen

  Edited by James Lainsbury

  All Rights Reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file

  To all my clients who have given me the honor of sharing their journey with me. Your resiliency inspires me every day.

  Contents

  Foreword

  Introduction: Healthy Habits Suck

  Part 1: Being Healthy Is Hard

  Chapter 1: The Marathon Runner Who Hated Running

  Chapter 2: Weight and Other Things You Don’t Control

  Part 2: How to Be Healthy…Even if You Don’t Want To

  Chapter 3: Passengers on the Bus

  Chapter 4: If You Don’t Like the Weather, Wait Ten Minutes

  Chapter 5: Be Glad You Don’t Put Your Socks on like a Two-Year-Old

  Chapter 6: I Suck at Being Compassionate with Myself

  Part 3: Living a Healthy Life

  Chapter 7: Get Yourself out of Solitary Confinement

  Chapter 8: You Will Fall off the Wagon

  Chapter 9: How Doctors Choose to Die

  Acknowledgments

  References

  Foreword

  Why is it so incredibly difficult to be healthy?

  Why do so many people struggle to initiate healthy behaviors that they know will make them happy?

  Why do most common-sense approaches to health and wellness usually fail in the long term?

  And what can we do differently to help ourselves build the sorts of lives we can truly and deeply appreciate—including but not limited to being physically and emotionally healthy?

  These are a few of the key questions that Dayna Lee-Baggley explores and answers within this book using a science-based approach called ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy). The ACT model offers a powerful set of realistic, practical, and evidence-based strategies to help you develop the kinds of healthy habits and behaviors that are the foundation of a purposeful and fulfilling life—all while effectively handling the pain that inevitably goes with it.

  Hang on a moment: did I just suggest that pain is inevitable? Yes, I sure did. The inconvenient truth is that life is both wonderful and terrible. If we live long enough, we will experience both happiness and heartbreak, success and failure, love and loss, bliss and despair, health and illness, joy and regret. These opposites are a package deal, just like no one gets a free ride or a smooth journey. The fact is, life is difficult, and it serves up pain and suffering for us all.

  But hey—it’s not all bad! Fortunately for us, the ACT model gives us a way forwards in the face of life’s many hardships. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy gets its name because of a key theme: it teaches us how to reduce the impact and influence of painful thoughts and feelings (acceptance), while simultaneously taking action to build a life worth living (co
mmitment). And in the pages that follow, Dayna Lee-Baggley will show you, step-by-step, how to do this in the realm of health behaviors. Where you go from there is ultimately up to you.

  Enjoy the journey; you are in good hands.

  —Russ Harris, author of The Happiness Trap

  Introduction:

  Healthy Habits Suck

  If you google “how to be healthy,” you’ll find a whole bunch of websites offering easy and fast tricks. But guess what? They lie. Being healthy is hard. It’s so hard that most of us are not healthy. The majority of North Americans eat too much processed food, don’t sleep enough, drink too much, and are overweight. In fact, if you are a “normal” weight, you’re actually abnormal—that is, you’re in the minority, because most of us now live with overweight or obesity.

  If you’re someone who gets up every morning and can’t wait for your run, considers eating sweet potatoes a splurge, and sets aside thirty minutes every morning to meditate—this book isn’t for you. It sounds like you’re already living your healthiest life! If you’re someone who thinks about getting up to go for a run but goes back to sleep, regrets last night’s fast-food dinner, and can barely remember how you got to work, let alone take the time to be mindful, then this book is for you! While there aren’t statistics for what percentage of the United States is composed of these different types of people, rest assured that if you’re one of the ones who doesn’t want to exercise, you are not alone. In fact, I argue that you’re part of the majority. Together we’re going to figure out how you can live your healthiest life, even when you don’t feel like it.

  I won’t offer you false hope in this book. I won’t try to convince you that healthy living is easy, or that there’s a type of exercise that will make you want to get up early to do it, or that broccoli tastes as good as ice cream. What I will offer you is an understanding, based on science, of why long-term healthy habits are so hard to maintain. I will provide you with tools that will help you increase your willingness to do the hard work of being healthy.

  Being Healthy Is Hard!

  Many of us know what we should be doing to be healthy, so I’m not going to spend much time on these topics. Most of us already know that we should sleep more, eat more vegetables, stop smoking, and exercise more often. If you have a health condition, it’s likely there are a number of health behaviors you are supposed to do, such as restricting certain foods (for example, sweets) or engaging in more physical activity. There are also things that some of us think we should be doing to be healthy, such as yoga or walking in nature more often. In this book I’ll use the term “health behaviors” to describe all these things, what we should be doing (or think we should be doing) to be healthy.

  However, it’s pretty clear that across the globe we’re not doing the things we should be doing to be healthy. Diabetes among adults rose from 4.7 percent in 1980 to 8.5 percent in 2014 (World Health Organization 2018a). The obesity rate has more than tripled since 1975 (World Health Organization 2018b). More than one-third (36.5 percent, or 118.3 million) of US adults now live with obesity (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2018), and globally more than 1.9 billion adults live with overweight or obesity as of 2016 (World Health Organization 2018b). About 85.6 million Americans have some form of cardiovascular disease or suffer from the aftereffects of stroke (American Heart Association 2014). Nine in ten Canadians over the age of twenty have at least one risk factor for heart disease, and four in ten have three or more risk factors (Heart Research Institute 2018). On a broad scale, humans are not living a healthy lifestyle.

  Being Healthy Is Abnormal!

  So, if we all know we should be doing things to be healthy, why aren’t we doing them? In my opinion, it’s because health behaviors are abnormal. Yah, I just said that. It’s probably shocking to hear such a thing, especially in a book about being healthy, but it’s true. Almost every health behavior requires us to do something that goes against our natural instincts as humans.

  Let’s look at physical activity as an example. Imagine human beings millions of years ago, in the age of cave people. One caveman thought to himself, I should go running. His thoughts and feelings supported this plan: Good idea! Let’s do it! So he got up early and went for a run. Another caveman thought the same thing, but his thoughts and feelings didn’t support the idea: Why bother? You can do it tomorrow. Besides, it’s too cold out there. So he laid back down in the cave and went back to sleep.

  Later that day while hunting in the forest, a bear started chasing both cavemen. Who do you think ended up being lunch? If you picked the caveman who chose to sleep instead of going for a run, you are correct. (Keep in mind that just to survive they were both getting the amount of exercise that triathletes get nowadays, so they were both really fit to begin with.) He had more energy available when he needed it. As a caveman you didn’t need to be the fastest, you just had to be faster than the other guy.

  Now let’s return to modern times. Let’s say you’re lying on your couch and you think, I should go for a walk. My physician says I need to exercise more. What happens? If you’re a well-functioning human, the instinctive, automatic response is to not go for a walk but to rest. This is no accident. As a result of millions of years of evolutionary pressure, our automatic, natural instincts are to rest when we can. This behavior helped us survive as a species. Perhaps you felt too tired to get up off the couch or you thought I can do it later. This is exactly how your brain and body have evolved to work!

  The same is true of how our brain and body react to fatty, sugary, salty foods. Parts of our brains “light up” when we eat them, the same ones that are activated by cocaine. (In fact, your brain lights up even more for sugar than it does for cocaine). What does this mean? It means that fatty, sugary, and salty foods were incredibly rewarding to cave people—and, by evolutionary extension, us—on a physiological level.

  Millions of years of evolution have shaped humans to avoid pain, seek pleasure, take the path of least resistance, and live for today. These principles make complete sense when you consider the lives of our ancient ancestors. Pain was associated with life-threatening events or death; survival required a lot of energy, so they consumed foods with fat and sugar and conserved energy whenever possible by following the path of least resistance; and they focused on the here and now compared to what might be good ten years from now, because ten years from now didn’t matter if you couldn’t stay alive today (plus, their life span was only about thirty years). Cave people who followed these principles were more likely to survive an attack or a long winter without food and therefore had more offspring. So, over time, these behaviors shaped humans. And as we evolved, these behaviors turned into instincts hardwired in the human brain and passed down to future generations. This is why parts of our brain still respond as if we’re living in cave people times. This is part of the reason why living healthy can be challenging.

  Health behaviors require you to do the opposite of these principles: you have to experience pain and discomfort (for example, go for a run), avoid pleasure (for example, don’t eat ice cream), take the most difficult path (for example, take the stairs instead of the elevator), and live for the future (for example, stop smoking because it could kill you twenty years from now). It’s worth repeating that health behaviors are abnormal!

  Don’t lose hope just because your instinctive responses aren’t the healthy ones. You don’t have to follow them. Every day we override our automatic instincts. Have you ever wanted to punch your boss because he was being super annoying, but you didn’t—that’s you overriding your instincts. If you got out of a nice warm bed this morning to go to work—that’s you overriding your instincts. If you put money in a bank—that’s you overriding your instincts. How do we do this? Our frontal lobe. In contrast to the ancient parts of our brain, the frontal lobe evolved more recently. It manages executive functions, such as delaying gratification and making plans. It can override all kinds of message
s sent from the more ancient brain, but doing so requires deliberate effort. In this book you’re going to learn how to harness your ability to override your instincts in order to live a healthier life.

  About This Book

  This book is partly based on my work, which has a foundation of field-tested science and, in particular, acceptance and commitment therapy. Acceptance and commitment therapy is a type of cognitive behavioral therapy that involves aspects of behavior change, mindfulness, and acceptance to address mental and physical problems. Literally hundreds of studies have examined the effectiveness of acceptance and commitment therapy for reducing human suffering by treating physical and emotional problems. I’m a researcher and a registered clinical psychologist who specializes in helping people with chronic health problems. Every day I encourage individuals to be healthier or teach health care providers how to encourage their patients to be healthier, so in this book I included many of my real-life experiences working with hundreds of people trying to improve their health. Some of these people had life-threatening health conditions, and some of them just wanted to look better in a bathing suit. In order to protect their confidentiality, I changed their names and aspects of their stories. In some cases I combined different parts of different stories, or I changed details.

  This book is also about my personal experience. I am a generally healthy person who, until recently, didn’t have to dedicate too much attention to being healthy. It’s a running joke in my family that I hate vegetables (apparently going back to infancy), and I don’t consider myself an athlete. For most of my life I was in a normal weight category, except when I was pregnant. Then, about two years before I wrote this book, my marriage ended. We did not have a “conscious uncoupling.” Although I felt the change would be a positive one in the long run, it was incredibly stressful and painful in the short run, and during this period I gained forty pounds. I tried to lose some of the weight with minor corrections that had been successful in the past, but nothing seemed to work. At one point I was exercising six days a week, including going to boot camp three times a week, running “hills” twice a week, running a 10K every Sunday, and watching my diet. With all that effort I lost nothing. Zilch. Zero. In fact, I continued to gain weight! Perhaps you’re thinking, as I did—briefly—that I was gaining muscle. Wrong! Expensive body-fat testing indicated that I was not losing fat.