Mini Habits for Weight Loss: Stop Dieting. Form New Habits. Change Your Lifestyle Without Suffering.

"Fat loss is a side effect of living healthier." ~ pg. 153I have a diet saboteur in my house! Often this person will bring home six donuts or bags of candy and leave them on the counter. I myself have been known to buy candy on occasion and hide it from this person because they will eat it all up and I think of sugar as a treat for good behavior. I also sometimes get in the mood to make 24 cupcakes but I give 99% of them away. Usually I have one or two and that is about it. I just really love baking!So between me and this person we are causing ourselves ill health because of ingesting some of the wrong foods. What to do? I figured reading a book on developing good habits couldn't hurt! I was right. This book has a lot of helpful tips and tricks to make healthy living much more easy and not as challenging.One of the best sentences in the book is this:"The home eating waris won and lost in the grocery store."I figured this out years ago actually. I knew if I bought it, I'd eat it so I stopped buying sugary chocolates on impulse and started ordering stevia sweetened chocolate from amazon. That alone cut down a lot of sugar cravings because I wasn't feeding the addiction.Some of the things I'm going to do more after reading this book is freezing bananas because they really do taste like ice cream. After considering further I do remember I lost some weight drinking green tea so maybe I should go back to that habit!What kind of questions does this author answer? Well a lot of good ones!Why is dieting only going to make you gain more weight?Why does your brain need to change before your body will follow?What can you control and what should you let slide?What is the best exercise to lose weight?What foods are best to eat on a regular basis? (Do more research on brown rice before you go for it!)Is fruit bad for weight loss or just the opposite?What is the real reason people gain weight in the abdominal area?What I noticed about this book is the author's sense of humor. He made me lol several times and be amused quite a bit. Just thinking of him doing his mini habits was funny.One thing the author didn't say was that when you go to a restaurant you should put half the food they bring you in a to-go box right away. This helps with the decision to eat all your food on your plate. If there is only half the food there, bingo!This book made me hungry for cucumber slices dipped in hummus, spaghetti squash with pesto and fruit-infused water. Basically it made me want to eat healthier because it all sounded so delicious. This book is inspiring me to buy more fruits and vegetables.In the section on exercise and fitness the author does mention guided meditation but that is a whole other thing and if you don't want to get caught up in changing your religion, look for non religious meditation and yoga. Sometimes I love just watching DVDs of ocean waves breaking on the shore. That can make me quite sleepy and ready for bed.However, since I've been using a slow cooker a lot lately I'd say preparation times are more like 20-30 minutes not one minute! Unless you have all the vegetables cut up for your lentil soup it is going to take 30 minutes to put it all in the slow cooker. But hey, once that is done you are free for five hours to exercise and read a book. The author may not have come across kosher hot dogs either. I buy those. He seems to think all hot dogs are the worst. I agree I only eat the special kosher ones.So this book is mostly about easy does it. Make changes slowly and make them into habits that you will do automatically and eventually your body will just start changing on its own and you will have less to think about.So on my next shopping trip I'm going to remember the lettuce because I really like making salads and I've gotten out of practice in the past few weeks. Habits can come and go and when you have one that is working write it down so you don't forget to do it. I will go write "lettuce" down on my shopping list. Having a running list is essential for success.It is good to know that this book has advice that I can accept 99% of the time. I think however if I'm putting on my gym shoes I'm going to do more than one minute on the treadmill. Or better yet just jump on my trampoline for ten minutes without shoes on. I have no problem doing exercise once I start doing it and I think that is the point of the book and methods. Usually my problem is that I have a thought: "should I exercise right now" and I put it off thinking "I'll have more energy later." Then comes ten at night and I'm sleepy.So this is a convincing and inspirational pep talk about getting healthier with small changes in your eating and exercising habits. Reading this book seriously with a highlighter in hand will clue you into all the most important stuff for your lifestyle. Then it is a matter of writing a shopping list and putting a post it note where you can see it to do your mini habits. That is about it...easy peasy!To your success,~The Rebecca Review

Have you ever eaten a decadent slice of cheesecake, only to finish and think, "Man, I could really go for some vegetables right about now"?If not, let me introduce you to Stephen Guise and the concept of mini habits. The idea, as conceptualized in this book, is not to take an approach of deprivation and radical change, but to make small, incremental, consistent changes that ultimately result in a permanent, healthy lifestyle. Stephen (can I call him Stephen?) is upfront from the beginning: this is not a journey of quick fixes, rapid weight loss, and cleanse diets. This is about working with the brain's natural resistance to change by fooling it into thinking you're not asking much from it. And really, you're not. If your goal is to do one push-up a day, you will find yourself down on the ground much faster than if your goal is to do 20. And once you are down there, you will do some more. It's human nature. The hard part, the decision to do a thing, is over at that point. And even on your worst day, even if you really only can do one, you've still made some forward momentum and reinforced that daily habit.I only finished this book a couple of weeks ago, but I have already seen the changes happen. The most brilliant stroke was in never making a food craving off limits, no matter how ridiculously unhealthy. Instead, he encourages a movement toward healthy food, a letting go of the binary way we think about eating (''I'm going to eat healthy'' vs ''I'm going to eat badly.'') As he says in his book, you know what's better than three slices of pizza? Three slices of a pizza and a salad. It's pithy and funny, but there is much wisdom here. When we're at a party, we don't have to decide between carrots and cookies. We can have both. And that realization is the spark of something rather profound. The more whole foods you eat, the more you incorporate them into your daily life, the more you want them for their own sake, not because you should eat better, or because you are desperate to lose weight, but because they are tasty and make you feel good.My nutrition mini habit, one recommended by Stephen, is to make one healthy food upgrade a day. That means a banana with breakfast, or a vegetable with lunch, or water instead of soda for a meal... just one healthy change from the norm. What I've found, as Stephen predicted, is most days I do far more than that. Some days I find myself concocting entire meals from scratch, just because I would rather eat that. But even on my worst days, I can make that one change and feel like I have forward momentum. Thus I have found myself eating fresh vegetables alongside leftover pizza, and a red bell pepper after I finished my cheesecake.What's remarkably different from previous attempts to shift to a healthy lifestyle is that for the first time ever, it feels like a choice. Not some hard-nosed restriction I'm trying to impose on myself for my own good, but just making choices amidst the ebb and flow of everyday life (the fact that my other mini habit is sitting down on my meditation cushion before bed doesn't hurt... I am much more mindful of my eating habits based on increased meditation alone.) Even my fast food addiction is waning, not because I've forbidden it, but because I've noted that fast food generally makes me feel like crap. I'm saving my sweet tooth for higher quality desserts, stuff I really love. I'm no longer eating with an attitude of scarcity - I shouldn't be having this, I must eat it now because I can't have it later.When there is no famine, there is never any need for feast. I ate out at three restaurants this weekend, and not once did I overeat or feel guilty about my choices. It's the difference between "What's one small thing I can do to make this healthier?" and "Screw it, I'm going to eat all the things." When you're working within a more reasonable framework, when you stop with all or nothing thinking, you make more healthy choices than you would imagine, and you don't have to fight your lazy brain to do it.

Helps one to discover the root to your way of thinking, and to overcome that repetitive “failure”.

This book inspired me to incorporate mini habits into my life! I have started doing push ups and pulls on a daily basis. I also now use a measuring cup to be mindful of how much food I eat. The book also helped me discover brown rice which is a satiating food I enjoy eating.

Although this book started out slow, it started getting so informative, that it took me several days to read the entire book. I bought a set of 3 different books on diet sabotage through Amazon, and this book was the best of the three.

My copy is hard to read. There wasn’t enough ink used; ie: copy from copy. Bold print is ok.Next to the book is a magazinefor comparison of ink.I will try the hardback.

Life-changing habits. Very easy to implement. Hopeful that the strategies in this book will create lasting change. Biggest takeaway: Small steps create big accomplishments over time. Second takeaway: Processed food is poison.