Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives by Gretchen Rubin Page A

forty undemanding minutes split between the StairMaster and the stationary bike. Once a week, I do push myself hard, in my work-to-failure strength-training session; it’s extremely challenging, but it lasts only twenty minutes, so I can stand it.
    Other people, of course, have a completely different set of preferences. Someone told me: “I finally realized that I’m motivated by competition. Since I realized that, I’ve been having weekly ‘events’ with my friends. For the longest time I’ve wanted to be this excited about working out.”
    In tackling this area of my Foundation, I didn’t want to add more official periods of “exercise” to my week, but I did want to move around more. As a writer, I sit for many hours to work, and I spend most of my free time sitting as well, so I looked for a few habits to help pull me onto my feet.
    One of my twelve Personal Commandments is to “Act the way I want to feel.” It’s easy to assume that we act because of the way we feel , but to a very great degree, we feel because of the way we act . If I act with more energy, I’ll feel more energetic.
    I decided to set myself the habit of going for a walk once each weekend. Each time I set off, it was an effort to get myself out the door, but I did return each time with more energy.
    While physical activity is a key aspect of the Foundation and has many emotional and physical benefits, people often assume that its most important benefit is something that, ironically, it doesn’t provide: exercise doesn’t promote weight loss . It seems to help people maintain their weight—active people are less likely to gain or regain weight than inactive people—but it’s not associated with weight loss. There are many compelling reasons to exercise, but study after study shows that weight loss isn’t one of them. The way to lose weight is to change eating habits.
    Third: eat and drink right. Few aspects of everyday life are more foundational than eating, but many people feel out of control with food. There’s a paradox: because the brain needs food to manage impulses, one of the best ways to avoid impulsive overeating is to eat.
    For my Foundation, I decided to make it a habit to eat only when I was hungry, and stop as soon as I was full. This is harder than it sounds, however, because so many cues overwhelm our sense of physical hunger. Often we eat not from hunger, but because of routine, social influences, the sight or smell of food, and other external triggers. (Unfortunately, being “on a diet” seems to make people more sensitive to outside cues.) Also, although the average meal is eaten in about twelve minutes, it takes twenty minutes for the body to register a feeling of fullness. In practice, I discovered, “eat only when I’m hungry” and “no seconds” turned out to be among the habits that I break most often. The logistics of life, and the temptations of food, make them hard to follow.
    But while I still sometimes eat when I’m not hungry, I always eat when I’m hungry. I hate being hungry and was astonished when a friend told me, “My favorite thing is to wake up hungry in the middle of the night.” When I’m hungry, I get “hangry,” with a quick temper, and I can’t work or think.
    To that end, I always eat breakfast.
    There’s some controversy about breakfast. Many people point to studies showing that breakfast eaters tend to be thinner, but this is an observation about correlation, not causation; a study of existing research concluded that the habit of skipping breakfast showed little or no effect on weight gain. Nevertheless, although I’m not convinced there’s any special magic to breakfast, I always do eat breakfast. Not letting myself get too hungry is part of my Foundation.
    Research suggests that skipping meals is a bad idea, perhaps because being hungry makes it harder to