New Year's resolution season is here again. My friend V is one of the resolvers, and I'm worried that she may find herself among the many whose annual attempts at behavior change are short lived.

She's trying to pull off a massive change and she's going at it without much of a plan. She wants to stop eating sugary sweets (candy, pastries, soda, that kind of thing). V loves sweets - she's one of the only grown-ups I know that will actually buy and eat a full sized candy bar - so this is big for her.

She's going cold turkey, with only a small jar of sugar free candies at her desk to help her.  It's just her, her willpower, and her little jar of candies against this powerful monster of a sugar habit. So scary…

When you're trying to pull off long term change - like eating healthier - doing it in small steps that you can gradually work into your lifestyle gives you a much better chance of success than trying to go big all at once.

We've seen that approach work in our family. For years, Suzan and I had desperately wanted to eat healthier, both for ourselves and our girls. But talking about it, "just trying harder", and continuing to feel bad about it weren't working.

Then we tried a small, specific change - one healthy smoothie a day - and we were able to make that stick. From there we saw our preferences shift, seemingly on their own, to more fresh fruits and veggies, and less fried and processed foods.

It's the same approach that BJ Fogg's Tiny Habits behavior change program is based on, and he's kind of a big deal in the behavior change space.

It's also the idea behind these quotes from some other fairly smart fellows:

• "The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." - Lao Tzu or Confucius, depending on which website you believe :)
• "The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones." - Confucius
• "Dripping water hollows out stone, not through force, but through persistence." - Ovid

When you're trying to eat healthier, keep your changes small, manageable, even comfortable. Have a plan for when your motivation and willpower fall (because they will). And commit to consistency, not intensity. Keep at it, even if it's only a really small version of your thing on low/no motivation days.

For smoothies, don't hesitate to make it a 1-Ingredient Super Smoothie when you need to. It'll feel silly, but it will keep your smoothies in your day and in your life on even a really tough day. Then you can bounce back the next day even stronger. 

​Have an awesome day.
​- Shaun

​If you enjoyed this article then you might want to check out my Guided Smoothie Tour weekly email series. Here's what you get on the Tour:

• More articles like this one about how to create a healthy smoothie habit that lasts
• Links to over 70 smoothie recipes from nearly 50 food and smoothie bloggers
• A downloadable pdf containing a summarized version of my ebook Smoothie a Day the Easy Way
• If you find it's not for you, cancel any time. No questions, no worries :)

If any of that sounds appealing, then let me know which email address to use and we'll get you started. If not, no worries at all. Either way, have an awesome day.

We spent 10 days with my wife's family over the holidays last year. Great for seeing the kids play with their cousins. Bad for our smoothie habit. We still managed a smoothie every day, but it was a lot harder than when we're at home.

Different blender (Blendtec vs. our Vitamix), worrying about bothering everyone with the blender noise, not having much of a schedule, etc., etc.

Most days we had smoothies that were pretty similar to ones we'd make at home. But one day I ended up pulling the rip cord on our emergency smoothie parachute and having a 1-Ingredient Super Smoothie.

Everyone, including my kids, looked at me like I had 3 heads. That's fine though. Despite being counter intuitive, I think the 1-Ingredient Super Smoothie makes perfect sense and I get that most people don't get it at first.

The one ingredient? Water.

We poured some water into my brother in law's Blendtec, hit blend for a couple of seconds, then poured it back out into our glasses and drank it.

Crazy, right? It's OK, you can be honest. I get why it seems so silly…because it IS silly. And that's a big part of why it's so useful (see below).

3 reasons why drinking a 1-Ingredient Super Smoothie is MUCH BETTER than having no smoothie at all on days when a regular smoothie is just not going to happen:

1. Because you can. All you need are a few seconds, some water, and a blender. Heck, even if you don't have a blender, pour water in a glass, stir a few times, and drink up.
2. Because it keeps you consistent with your smoothies. You still respond to a cue, perform the action of making a smoothie (albeit a really small version), and get the reward of feeling satisfied at having won with your smoothies on a really tough day.
3. Because it is really motivating. There's nothing like the satisfaction of having been consistent with your smoothies on a difficult day to make you feel motivated to keep having them...except possibly the motivation to have a real smoothie next time so you can avoid feeling silly like you did when you blended a glass of water.

The reality of committing to have healthy smoothies for life is that there will be some days when you don't. If you're not prepared, those days can really throw your smoothie habit off track. One way to handle them is the 1-Ingredient Super Smoothie.  

​Have an awesome day.
​- Shaun

If you enjoyed this article then you might want to check out my Guided Smoothie Tour weekly email series. Here's what you get on the Tour:

• More articles like this one about how to create a healthy smoothie habit that lasts
• Links to over 70 smoothie recipes from nearly 50 food and smoothie bloggers
• A downloadable pdf containing a summarized version of my ebook Smoothie a Day the Easy Way
• If you find it's not for you, cancel any time. No questions, no worries :)

If any of that sounds appealing, then let me know which email address to use and we'll get you started. If not, no worries at all. Either way, have an awesome day.

If you go looking online for ways to save time with your smoothies, you'll find lots of blog posts and YouTube videos about different ways to prep ahead of time, which, I agree IS a great time saver.

HOWEVER…prepping ahead is not, in my opinion, the best smoothie time saver. And it's honestly not even a close second. 

My number 1? Making recipes that are familiar, simple, and easy. Specifically, making only a few different recipes that have easy-to-find ingredients and that:

1. You know you like
2. You can shop for and make without looking at a recipe

The time and effort required to shop and prep a brand new smoothie recipe has got to be at least 10 times what you'd spend on a simple smoothie you've had many times before. Just the number of times you have to refer back to the recipe puts it way over the top.

It's so easy to get caught up in the smoothie porn you see online - the thousands upon thousands of smoothie recipes and pictures that you find in blog posts and social media. They all look so pretty and sound so good. And like one person I was talking with said, if you're not making lots of different smoothies and trying some of the exotic ingredients you hear about, you can start to feel like you're somehow inadequate or doing it wrong.

That's understandable, but if you feel that way then you're focused on the wrong thing. When you're trying to stick with your smoothies as a way to eat healthier, the most important thing is to be consistent with having your healthy smoothies every day, even if it's the same old couple of recipes every time.

To be clear though, I'm not at all against exploring and trying new recipes. In fact, my Guided Smoothie Tour weekly email series shares a ton of new smoothies. You just need to know how to fit them in so they don't throw your smoothie habit off track.

One point I make in my smoothie habit plan is that we only do things when our motivation to do them exceeds the effort required. Said another way, the easier something is to do, the more likely we are to do it. I think we all get that, but I also think that far too often we over emphasize staying motivated and under emphasize keeping things simple and easy.

Motivation is like a wave in the ocean. Enjoy the ride when it's there, but also plan for it to slip away and not come back for a while. Making your smoothies as easy as possible helps you stick with them while you wait for that next wave of motivation to come through. 

Try new smoothie recipes when you have a little more time (e.g. on weekends, holidays, etc.) or are feeling especially motivated. But on most days when you're just trying to get a smoothie in you before you head out the door to work, stick with your tried and true favorites. And consider prepping your smoothies ahead of time too… :)

Have an awesome day.
​- Shaun

If you enjoyed this article then you might want to check out my Guided Smoothie Tour weekly email series. Here's what you get on the Tour:

• More articles like this one about how to create a healthy smoothie habit that lasts
• Links to over 70 smoothie recipes from nearly 50 food and smoothie bloggers
• A downloadable pdf containing a summarized version of my ebook Smoothie a Day the Easy Way
• If you find it's not for you, cancel any time. No questions, no worries :)

If any of that sounds appealing, then let me know which email address to use and we'll get you started. If not, no worries at all. Either way, have an awesome day.

Whether you are working in the kitchen, the yard, or the workshop, using the right tool for the job makes all the difference. Have you ever tried to "wing it" on some task rather than stop and get the right tool only to find yourself spending way more time and effort to get a way worse result? In hindsight it seems obvious, "Get a hammer, Einstein. Don't try to drive that nail with the back end of a screwdriver," but somehow it's easy to lose track of the obvious right answer along the way.

The same is true when the "task" you're working on is a healthy lifestyle change, like starting to exercise regularly or to significantly improve your diet. Making a big change and sticking with it is really hard. If you try to wing it, there's a good chance you'll struggle and fail. Ever start a diet or exercise program only to quit after the initial momentum faded? It's tough, isn't it? 

Use the right tool to significantly increase your odds of having your big change endure over the long term. The right tool for this job? Habit. Once something becomes a habit, you'll do it nearly automatically, with very little thought or effort.

Our brains are lazy, always looking for the easiest ways to do things in order to conserve energy. Habit is the brain's own tool for making things easier to do. Once your brain creates a habitual routine around something, the routine moves from the part of the brain where conscious, intentional thought happens to a much older part where it can be retrieved easily and automatically. Scientific experiments measuring brain activity show that the brain works significantly less hard to perform a task once it has become a habit.

Your brain will turn anything it can into a habit. It happens all the time. One study estimated that over 40% of our actions are actually the result of habits rather than conscious thought. Think of things you do every day: getting ready for work, making yourself coffee, driving to work and home again, booting up your computer, etc. Most of those things are probably habitual.

But you probably didn't create those habits on purpose. Your brain did it on its own. Habit will be a much more useful tool if you can choose which things to use it on. Luckily, you can create habits on purpose. There's no magic to habit formation and the principles are pretty simple, though applying them successfully can take a bit of trial and error. Like any tool, you need to learn how habit works in order to use it properly.

Here are a few of the basic concepts:

• A habit is made up of three pieces that together are called a "habit loop". The cue or trigger tells your brain it's time to kick off the habit; the action is the thing you actually do; and the reward is some measure of joy or satisfaction that tells your brain the routine is worth remembering for next time.
• To start a new habit or change an existing one, be sure to focus on the cue and reward at least as much as the action.
• Perform a habit loop consistently for long enough and a habit will form. How long it will take will vary; just keep at it. Consistency is the name of the game. 
• In order to stay consistent while you wait for your habit to kick in, keep in mind that you'll only do things that you remember to do and that your motivation to do exceeds the effort required. So look for ways to remind yourself to do your thing, to stay motivated, and to make your thing easier.

If you want to learn more about habits, including how to start or change them, then I recommend you check out two blogs and two books.

• jamesclear.com by James Clear is a treasure trove of information about habits and behavioral science. He’s got a wonderfully clear and concise writing style as well. My claim that the length of time required to start a new habit will vary is based on James Clear’s blog post How Long Does it Actually Take to Form a New Habit? (Backed by Science)

​

• Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg, PhD. Dr. Fogg is a professor at Stanford University and runs their Persuasive Technology Lab. His Tiny Habits program is a simple, free program that allows people to try his behavior change methodology for themselves. BJ's Fogg Behavior Model is the foundation for how I think about how to use reminders, motivators, and "ways to make things easy" to support consistency.

​

• The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Pulitzer prize award winning journalist Charles Duhigg. With The Power of Habit Duhigg has probably done more than any other to get the word out about the huge advancements made in recent years in our understanding of how habits work and how to start and change them. I drew from it several times in this article:
  • Habits live in an older part of the brain than conscious thought…p. 13
  • Habitualized actions are easier for the brain to perform…p. 15
  • Habit is the brain's tool for making things easier to do…p. 17
  • Over 40% of a person's daily actions are done via habit…p. xvi
  • The concept of the habit loop and the importance of focusing on the cue and reward to start or change a habit…p. 19

​

• Smoothie a Day the Easy Way: A Handbook for Starting a Lifelong Daily Healthy Smoothie Habit is a 64 page ebook that gives a step by step plan for using these same principles of habit formation to accomplish the specific goal of creating a daily healthy smoothie habit. For a shorter, free version, join my Guided Smoothie Tour email series. Everyone who joins the Tour gets a 14 page summary of Smoothie a Day that includes the full habit plan and a 100 Days of Smoothies wall chart to get you started and track your progress. Just let me know which email address to use and I'll get you started.

​Have an awesome day.
​- Shaun 

BJ Fogg, PhD is a professor at Stanford University and the Director of their Persuasive Technology Lab.  According to his website bjfogg.com, his specific area of professional expertise is creating systems to change human behavior, including creating habits. Dr. Fogg tells us we really only have three options for creating significant, lasting change in our lives:

1. Have an epiphany - a realization so significant that it changes your outlook enough to change your behavior as well
2. Change your environment
3. Use baby steps - a series of small changes that over time add up to the big change you really want

Epiphanies are usually outside of our control, and for many of us, changing our environment is really hard to do. That leaves us with only one scientifically proven way to reliably change behavior: little by little over time. 

Now, take a look at the CDC infographic at the top of this article. It tells us that no less than half of adults in the U.S. have at least one chronic disease and half of those have at least two.

​Holy crap.

I'm 45 years old, and even though I'm still in pretty good shape, those kinds of stats scare me. If you or people you know are starting to show up in the wrong 50% and 25%, then I bet they scare you too. 

If the big behavior change you're after is a healthier lifestyle, then you'll need to start with something small and easy that you can build on over time. A sort of gateway drug to healthier living. That's why my wife Suzan and I chose to start with healthy smoothies to start our family down a healthier path. Done right, eating better with easy, healthy smoothies is the easiest, significant healthy lifestyle change that I know of. 

In July 2015, Suzan and I decided to start having healthy smoothies every day as a way to get ourselves and our two daughters to eat more fresh fruits and vegetables. We'd always wanted to eat better, but for one reason or another had struggled to fit it in. Since then, all four of us have had a healthy smoothie on over 99% of our days. We feel great about what we eat, and our kids have developed a taste for eating healthy foods, making us feel like champion parents as well.

And now that we're "addicted" to our gateway drug, we've seen other healthy habits start to crop up as well, seemingly on their own. We eat more vegetables and less processed foods without really trying. It just seems like the normal thing to do. Deep fried foods that once would've made us say "Yum!" are now really unappealing. The coolest part is seeing our kids' reaction as they gobble up veggies and turn down opportunities to eat junk food without any prompting from my wife or I. 

Along the way we've learned a few things about how to make a change like this stick. The fact that we've made our smoothies easy has been a big part of it. But Easy isn't enough on its own. It's been important for us to support our daily smoothies with a few other things that together have become our smoothie habit plan. Some of the most important parts of that plan include:

• Building in reminders to keep smoothies in our attention
• Tapping into different sources of motivation so we're not reliant on just one
• Making smoothies easy with few and simple recipes, cutting corners on prep, and doing just enough clean-up, but no more
• Having a super easy smoothie as a back-up plan for those days when our motivation abandons us or we really are out of time
• Having a consistent routine for our habit to latch onto
• Having the right mindset so we're always focused on only the most important thing (having our smoothies every day) and to prepare ourselves for the inevitable rough spots that will come along

If you've been wanting to live healthier but have struggled to either get started or to stick with it, then you might consider starting a smoothie habit as a first step. 

Cheers,
- Shaun

If you enjoyed this article then you might want to check out my Guided Smoothie Tour weekly email series. Here's what you get on the Tour:

• More articles like this one about how to create a healthy smoothie habit that lasts
• Links to over 70 smoothie recipes from nearly 50 food and smoothie bloggers
• A downloadable pdf containing a summarized version of my ebook Smoothie a Day the Easy Way
• If you find it's not for you, cancel any time. No questions, no worries :)

If any of that sounds appealing, then let me know which email address to use and we'll get you started. If not, no worries at all. Either way, have an awesome day.

I called my Mom the other day. As we spoke I heard this "crunch, crunch, crunch" sound in the background.

Turns out she was out walking for exercise on a gravel path that goes around a park in her neighborhood. Not normal for my Mom. Except she's been doing it just about every day for the last 3 weeks. I guess her normal has shifted a bit. 

When I asked her about it she said that seeing the new habits I'd started in my life and hearing me talk about it had inspired her. She's in her 60's and knows she needs to be more active. But until now she hadn't figured out how to fit it in regularly.

Outside of a few casual conversations, we hadn't talked much about how active she was or wasn't. I hadn't coached her on it at all.

Apparently good habits are contagious.

Then I looked around I saw that my kids had caught the bug too. 

I exercise a little bit every day. Lately my 6 year old has been asking if we can walk to school instead of drive so she can get exercise on the way. And last night my 8 year old stopped in the middle of her math homework to do a quick set of jumping jack burpees. 

So cool.

And it turns out I'm not the only one who's noticed that good habits can be spread and caught like a virus. 

 So, the evidence tells us that what we do, whether good or bad, is likely to effect what the people around us do.

What, then, could starting that good habit you've been putting off do for the people closest to you? Who are those people in your life? Your spouse? Your kids? Other family? Friends? 

How much happier or healthier would you all be after say, 20 years of doing your thing consistently? How would you feel about the way you'd positively affected their lives?

Sometimes it's easier to find motivation to do things for other people than for ourselves. Regardless of where the motivation comes from, starting and sticking with something new can be tough. But like most things, once you understand how it works, creating new habits becomes less magic and more just a series of steps.

If you enjoyed this article then you might want to check out my Guided Smoothie Tour weekly email series. Here's what you get on the Tour:

• More articles like this one about how to create a healthy smoothie habit that lasts
• Links to over 70 smoothie recipes from nearly 50 food and smoothie bloggers
• A downloadable pdf containing a summarized version of my ebook Smoothie a Day the Easy Way
• If you find it's not for you, cancel any time. No questions, no worries :)

If any of that sounds appealing, then let me know which email address to use and we'll get you started. If not, no worries at all. Either way, have an awesome day.