Easy Smoothies: Your Gateway Drug to a Healthier Lifestyle

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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

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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.