No Sweat | Michelle Segar | Summary
Preface
We have all joined gyms, started morning routines and made new year resolutions. We know we need the health and the weight loss. Yet “health” and “weight loss” does not by itself motivate us to sustain health-related behaviors.
Michelle Segar studies motivation for exercise and healthy lifestyles. She has made a difference to many lives, with simple changes.
According to her, the secret to achieving sustained change lies #doableAction in understanding how to create goals, motivation, and behavior that reflect what is most aligned with and meaningful to our sense of self.
It can be a relief to understand the science behind why it is not your fault that you’ve failed to stick with exercise and healthy lifestyle.
Note the Health and Wellness professionals
Do you want to know -
Why so many of your patients fail to stick with their intentions to exercise, change their eating habits, and lose weight?
Why people quickly revert to old habits, resulting in high rates of disease, lost productivity, poor mental health, and spiraling healthcare costs
Research shows that future health benefits, such as disease prevention, are too abstract to overcome people’s inertia and hectic schedules.
So, what is the best strategy, for behavior change?
We have to make physical activity explicitly relevant to the most important daily roles and priorities of our customers.
People are more likely to sustain behaviors that are essential to their daily lives in immediate and noticeable ways.
This philosophy and approach is inherently patient-centered.
No Sweat is also a resource for people who don’t feel comfortable or confident prioritizing time for their own self-care.
Chapter 1 - Its not about the sweat
I can’t seem to lose weight for more than a few months at a time, and then it comes back again.
When eating and moving become something we should do or have to do rather than something we want to do, it undermines motivation and participation big time.
The idea of exercise has become too much of a synonym for punishment.
Human beings are hardwired to choose immediate gratification over benefits we have to wait to receive.
If facing death and surviving serious illness aren’t motivation enough to take better care of yourself, what is?
The answer is so simple, it will surprise you. Why not move your body in ways that feel good to you instead?
Instead of watching calories and driving yourself to sweat, you’ll begin enjoying your life by being as physically engaged in it as possible.
To do this, first you have to get into what do you believe about what makes physical movement worth doing? You have to do this systematically.
In general, most people drop out only six months after starting. By contrast, on average, ten months after Michelle’s program ended, the majority of participants sustained an average 65 percent increase in physical activity ”
Life-centered activities such as house cleaning, gardening, and walking “count,” and even just sitting less can be of benefit for a variety of reasons -
More energy, better sleep, less stress, less depression, enhanced mood, improved memory, less anxiety, better sex life, higher life satisfaction, more creativity, and better well-being overall.
#doableAction There’s only one basic instruction: Take any and every opportunity to move, in any way possible, at whatever speed you like, for any amount of time. Do what makes you feel good; stop doing what makes you feel bad.
The old maps you’ve tried to follow to fitness and health are very likely the ones you’ve been sold by the diet and exercise industry, and they likely haven’t led you to physical activity that you enjoy or stay motivated to do.
The chapters in the first three parts of this book (Meaning, Awareness, and Permission) are the MAP that guides you on the path from where you are now to a new horizon. Use the chapters in the final part (Strategy) to guide your next steps as you move forward.
Here is quick tour of the territory -
Meaning. We often don’t give thought to what something means to us, yet everything in our lives is symbolic and holds a personal significance that affects how we feel about it, how we approach it, and how it motivates us. You can change a Meaning that leads to failure into a Meaning that motivates you to move.
Awareness of the realities of physical exercise, how you make decisions, how motivation works, and how to convert your Meaning of exercise from a chore into a gift.
Permission to put self-care at the top of your to-do list
Strategy - To get down to strategies that will set you up for sustainable success and keep you there.”
#doableAction Take a few minutes right now to think about which personal projects are most important to you in your everyday life.
The idea is to help you look at what’s most important to you through identifying your personal projects.
The rest of the book is about taking up a (or modifying an existing) personal project of enjoyable movement for yourself and sticking to it.
Meaning
Chapter 2 - Escaping the vicious cycle of Failure
Some estimates put the percentage of unused gym memberships as high as 67 percent!
No one sets out to fail.
Why do we keep running up against the same wall? We already know success doesn’t work that way.
So much of our advertising and popular culture focuses on instant results.
The first step is to understand how the Meaning we hold for exercise affects our relationship with it.
Making meaning . . . [is] something we’re doing almost constantly.
Meaning for a behavior is constructed from what we learn about it through living in our society. Everything in our lives does have a deeper symbolic Meaning that is unique to us.
It is essential to understand our Meaning of physical activity because research shows that our Meanings powerfully influence our subsequent motivation, decisions, how we cope with challenges, and ultimately whether we sustain physically active lives.
And every failure, every bad experience, reinforces the negative Meaning we hold for exercise.
A study showed that vast majority of the participants whose goals were weight loss and better health spent the least amount of time exercising overall—up to 32 percent less than those with other goals.
We like to think of ourselves as reasonable creatures, but logic doesn’t motivate us nearly as much as our emotions do. We approach what feels good and avoid what feels bad.
It’s time to stop choosing the wrong reasons for exercising.
They are generally ineffective because they don’t make physical activity explicitly relevant to our daily sense of enjoyment and fun.
When it comes to making a sustainable change in your behavior, understanding your Meaning is your starting place because it determines the tone of your relationship with being physically active (or any behavior).
You acquire your Meaning for exercise unconsciously, through your socialization (the messages of society, family, friends, and the media) and your past experiences with it.
It reinforces the way you view exercise and keeps you at war with your body:
If you maintain a negative Meaning for exercise -
You set unachievable weight- or body-related exercise goals.
You feel discouraged about your ability to be physically active.
You come to dislike being physically active.
A Chore or a Gift?
#doableAction On a scale of 1 to 5—with 1 being “a chore to accomplish” and 5 being “a gift to give yourself” —circle the number that best describes how you feel about exercise.
Physical activity doesn’t have to feel like a chore. You don’t have to exert willpower every time you think, you should be exercising.
Studies show the very real limitations of willpower, which is also called “ego depletion.”
This study shows that using self-control or willpower in one situation can deplete it in a future situation.”
In this case, seeing is believing: doableAction Reflect that using self-control in a prior situation actually influences our brain and reduces the potential to use it later?
Think about it. How many depleting tasks do you already perform in one day (taking care of children, doing your job, studying for exams, taking care of your parents)? The normal stress of life may actually reduce the way your brain responds to self-control, further decreasing its capacity to resist temptation.
Even though we can increase our willpower capacity through valuable activities like getting more sleep and even practicing self-control - that doesn’t mean that we should consider it as our primary plan for sustainability.
Because it reflects who you are instead of depleting you, this system actually energizes you when you use it, generating a positive and renewable source of motivation that has the potency to fuel lasting results.
Chapter 3 - Motivation from the inside out
Everything we’ve learned about exercise and physical activity through culture, the media, and our past experiences—
I’m not good at this,
It’s not supposed to be fun,
I’m being forced to do it, it hurts, it’s humiliating,
I was not chosen for the team,
I was chided about being overweight by someone who matters and who prescribed exercise as the remedy,
I was teased about it,
I felt self-conscious in the gym.
I will only do it because it will fix my unattractive body!
This creates our Meaning of exercise and physical activity.
We develop our perceptions and understanding about things over our entire lifetime, based on our own idea of how the world works that we’ve constructed from specific experiences and interactions, especially emotional ones.
Out of these experiences we develop associations that we generalize and project into the future.
Because these Meanings have been built through experience and knowledge, we can change them only by learning new things about exercise and physical activity and having new experiences with being physically active and exercising.
#doableAction Meaning can be modified only by learning and doing. We can not ‘intellectualise’ meaning into our lives!
Do you want to know why don’t exercise?
Our past experiences with exercise, our past reasons for doing it, and what we have learned to believe about it (as children and as adults) combine together to generate our negative Meanings for exercising and being physically active.
This (below) is one of the most important points of this whole book and the secret ingredient in the MAPS method -
Because we tend to approach what feels good and avoid what feels bad (unconsciously, outside of our Awareness), our Meaning about physical activity powerfully influences our behavior without our even knowing it.
Many people feel ambivalent about being physically active because of their accumulation of experiences over their lifetime about why they should do it and how it feels.
In general, if your exercise history has been predominantly or especially negative, the Meaning it has for you now also feels negative: It’s a chore.
Meaning became progressively more negative every time you forced yourself to sign up at the gym or every time you put weight back on.
Remember Childhood -
It’s like when your mom says ‘Eat your vegetables, they’re good for you. And you can’t leave the table until you finish all of them.’ So then of course you don’t want to touch the veggies, ever. Right? You want to eat snacks before dinner just to prove you can make your own choices.
Self-Determination Theory Supports the Benefits of Owning Our Choices.
Self-determination theory (SDT) distinguishes between feeling either “controlled” or “autonomous” toward a behavior, and it shows how these differences can affect subsequent motivation and adherence.
We are more likely to keep up the walks, if they reflect our core needs and desires, than we are to go on walks just to comply with the nagging feeling that we should walk,”
If you keep exercising in ways that don’t reflect you and your preferences, eventually your motivation will peter out and you’ll stop.
Framing Is Everything: The “Work or Fun” Study
Remember Tom Sawyer’s story where he gets his friends to paint the fence for him, by positioning it as a privilege.
Framing a behavior as work (an obligation) made the experience of engaging in the behavior depleting and caused participants to have more difficulty exerting self-control and finishing the task.
In contrast, when the same behavior was framed as an opportunity to have fun, completing the behavior was vitalizing and made subsequent self-control easier.”
A sub-theory of self-determination theory called goal contents theory suggests that your Why, or the outcome you hope for in making a behavior change like becoming more physically active, will determine whether you develop a more autonomous or controlling type of motivation.
#doableAction It is crucial to understand which Whys lead to autonomous motivation.
People who exercised with health-related or weight-loss Whys reported on average 30 percent less autonomous motivation and 15 percent more controlling motivation than those participants whose Whys aimed to reduce their daily stress or enhance their well-being.
The Right Whys motivate us because they are relevant to our daily lives and are personally meaningful.
Our Why is foundational. It has a domino effect on everything that follows: how we feel, how we behave, and our subsequent motivation to make choices that favor self-care and health.
If I l have two reasons to exercise instead of one. Won’t that give me more motivation?
Multiple motives seem to decrease motivation, not enhance it.
Marketers understand this perfectly. Consider how the most popular companies market their products to us. They don’t give us three different reasons to buy their product; they brand it with one primary meaning.
Having multiple motivations (both Wrong Whys and Right Whys) for doing a behavior is actually less motivating. They compete with each other, dilute your motivation, and create ambivalence, undermining your desire to stick with physical activity.
Awareness
Chapter 4 - Exorcising Exercise
Sandy didn’t really have an answer for that, just vague notions that some types of exercise “counted” while others didn’t, and the ones that counted were what she should be doing.
She didn’t stay motivated or have the energy to keep making herself go once her short-term goal was accomplished.
The women with body-shaping motives exercised almost 40 percent less than those who were not exercising to shape their bodies.
In addition, only 15 percent of the body-shapers reported walking compared to more than 50 percent of the non-body-shapers!
#doableAction When we choose to move in ways that don’t feel good, most of us are likely—I’d say predictably—not going to keep it up.
When your Whys for exercising are body shaping or achieving weight loss, it frequently leads you to exercise at higher intensities even if you don’t like to exercise that way because your objective is to burn as many calories as possible.
In general, when people exercise at intensities past the point at which it becomes hard to hold a conversation without panting, they feel less pleasure and begin to experience displeasure. This dip in pleasure and increase in displeasure can be highly demotivating.
If your goal is to maintain physical activity over a lifetime and reap the multitude of benefits it brings, try to refocus and start choosing to move in ways that feel good to you.
How you feel about an activity (e.g., How do I feel while I exercise?) is more likely to determine whether you consistently decide to do it, rather than its value to you (e.g., How much weight can I lose from this exercise?)
When people decide on their own to exercise at high intensities, they tolerate it better, if not enjoy it, and experience less displeasure compared to when higher-intensity exercise is imposed on them by others or shoulds.
#doableAction When you autonomously choose to exercise at higher intensities, your feelings about your physical activity are not undermined.
In order to change exercise from a chore into a gift, you need to “exorcise” it—to get rid of all of the beliefs, expectations, and Wrong Whys that have been undermining your relationship with movement and your motivation to move.
Also see - Switch | Chip Heath and Dan Heath - How to Change Things When Change Is Hard (New York: Broadway Books, 2010).
Chapter 5 - Count everything and Chose to Move
You can accumulate exercise, do it at lower intensities, and count life-centered activities like housework and gardening.
Less than 8 minutes in one go is OK too. There is growing support, using advanced measurement technologies, that shorter amounts of movement can benefit health and energy levels, and that being sedentary promotes physiological changes that harm health.
Once you start to believe that everything counts, you’ll see that every day offers a wide and infinitely varied continuum of opportunities to move (OTMs) that you can choose to take advantage of anytime.
Finding OTMs is a treasure hunt! #doableAction Go looking for opportunities in your daily life. Hunting them yourself, rather than picking them from someone’s list will give you autonomy!
#doableAction Deciding to believe that everything counts can be your bridge to building consistent daily movement that you can immediately benefit from.
#doableAction An important step toward embracing movement in your life is simply to become aware that your choices about how you move through your day truly are your choices.
#doableAction Read - Deskbound: Standing up to a Sitting world | Kelly Starrett
Chapter 6 - From a Chore to a Gift
Reframing your Why from a Wrong Why (for example, a future abstract goal to be healthy) to a Right Why (for example, because it will help you achieve something tangible that you want to experience and/or find personally compelling today) transforms your motivation. The Successful Cycle of Motivation starts from the Right Why.
To be healthy” tends to be a Wrong Why for many people because it is too abstract and doesn’t provide the immediate feedback we need to keep striving toward it. People are more motivated by immediate results than future rewards.
There are many incredible ways that being physically active can enhance your life every day—too many to list in this book. (Just a few are improved energy, less stress, higher life satisfaction, better mood, and improved immunity.)
#doableAction Pick the Right Why that feels most compelling to you now and test-drive it for a while by selecting the physical activity that delivers it.
Turning exercise and physical activity from a chore into a gift transforms your motivation and relationship with movement.
#doableAction Reward substitution—replacing a future reward with something positive that you can experience immediately—converts behaviour from a chore into a gift you want to give yourself.
Choosing to move for positive experiences is strategic for sustaining a physically active life because it turns physical activity into something you “like” to do and will continue “wanting” to do.
#doableAction Walking is a gift that virtually everyone can give themselves: It is easy, pleasurable, always available, and filled with social, soulful, and well-being benefits.
#doableAction Read Spark | John Ratey and Eric Hagerman - The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain.
Permission
Chapter 7 - Permission to prioritise self-care
When we do not prioritize our own self-care because we are busy serving others, our energy is not replenished. Instead, we are exhausted, and our ability to be there for anyone or anything else is compromised.
Caretakeritis—feeling overwhelmed, exhausted, and fatalistic about the possibility of ever changing anything or having enough time—results from allowing your endless should tasks to take priority over your own self-care needs. Caretakeritis keeps you depleted!
#doableAction Permission Is the Gateway to Prioritizing Your Self-Care
When you tune out everyday messages from your body and don’t take care of yourself in basic ways like getting enough sleep, you put yourself on a path of unhappiness, low productivity, and even serious physical and emotional issues.
Because your brain can change (neuroplasticity), you can give yourself Permission to change your self-(do-not)-care mindset - Give yourself Permission to prioritize your own self-care is the key to make regular physical activity a reality.
#doableAction If you don’t take care of yourself, no one else is going to do it for you. Are you good enough? precious enough? to give this care to yourself?
#doableAction Read - Unfuk Yourself | Gary John Bishop - to learn more about giving permissions. {You essentially tell it to yourself often, with sincerity, especially as you drift off to sleep and wake up first thing in the morning!}*
Chapter 8 - What sustains us - we sustain
The more energy you give to caring for yourself, the more energy you have to give to others and fuel what matters most in your life.
Self-care helps you with being fully yourself, a parent, a partner, and a professional, and brings you well-being.
When you spend time in activities that are meaningful and generate positive emotions and experiences, (e.g., physical activities you enjoy), it increases meaning, resilience, and well-being.
#doableAction Try to consider your own self-care and well-being one of your top personal projects.”
Regular physical activity is revitalising, makes you feel happier and more resilient, and fuels your most cherished roles and responsibilities.
#doableAction Stick to your chosen actions for at least 100 days. In this much time, you will see the benefits. So you won’t have to do anything special after that to stick to it. What sustains us, we sustain.
When you experience many small moments of happiness and satisfaction regularly over time, such as by sustaining a revitalising activity - it accumulates to a happier, healthier, more resilient and meaningful life.
Strategy
Chapter 9 - Six big ideas for lifetime sustainability
Consider that your goal is the ongoing pursuit of a lifetime of consistent physical movement and self-care.
The marketing from fitness companies has educated us to approach exercise as if we were dating it, but in reality, we need the steady partner who will stick with us, have fun with us, and give us the support we need throughout life.
There are six Big Ideas that will create the context for successfully negotiating physical activity within your busy life and cultivating lifelong sustainability.
To take up physical movement for a lifetime, you will need to fight many different challenges and temptations over time. You can not predict them or plan for them in advance. You have to unlearn and learn newer strategies appropriate to the situation at that time #doableAction Be a lifelong learner, in this quest.
Being a learner is not enough. You have to be resilient. #doableAction Set yourself up to Persist. Do only one thing. Do very small things. But persist.
If you want do this for life - you begin with the end in mind. #doableAction Ask yourself, what can I continue doing every day, starting today, for the rest of my life. Don’t count on it being dramatic or overly sexy. But stick to doing it anyways!
Use sustainable self-care as an essential Strategy for well-being. Feeling positive and energetic gives you more energy for what you care most about. #doableAction it is strategic to focus on learning how to integrate and sustain only one new, complex behavior at a time.
You should build consistency before quantity. #doableAction Start small, even if your mind is screaming, ‘can do much more than this!’. And stick to it!
#doableAction Integrate physical activity within your daily life. Physical movement is not a separate compartment, but simply the way to live and enjoy life to the fullest. Let your muscles and your body know this by experiencing it.
Chapter 10 - Sustainability Training
#doableAction Become a skilled self-care negotiator. Then negotiate with the world around you and with yourself, as needed, when needed.
When you decide to learn and apply these negotiation Strategies, you are autonomous and in the driving seat.
Negotiation Strategy #1 is to give physical activity clout. Understand the specific value that movement brings to your daily life, giving it influence—or clout—within the dynamics of all of your other daily roles and goals.
Negotiation Strategy #2 is to plan the logistical issues for the upcoming week. This part of the planning process deals with pragmatic questions: What type of physical activities will help you realize the benefits you want? When will you do them? For how long? Where?
Negotiation Strategy #3 is to decide to confront challenges, not roadblocks. Responding to each challenge mindfully, without added angst, provides valuable information about the sorts of things that can get in the way of maintaining your physical activity and how you can deal with them now and in the future.
Negotiation Strategy #4 is to bring friends and family on board. Being active is a wonderful way to have fun and spend quality time with friends and loved ones.
Negotiation Strategy #5 is to use if-then planning. This is the very best insurance policy for making sure you get the valuable experiences you want from being active. The specific back-up plan and alternatives you make helps you to overcome the challenges that will arise to your plans.
Negotiation Strategy #6 is to dance with your challenges, be flexible, and improvise. Being willing to be flexible, improvise, and think creatively about your options will help you develop more effective Strategies and is key for sustaining a physically active life.
Negotiation Strategy #7 is to hesitate before you respond to a request. Allow yourself some time to really assess whether you can and want to fulfill any given request, based on your own needs and plans.
Negotiation Strategy #8 is to listen to your body’s messages. Forcing your body to do something it’s not up for sends the message “chore.” If you force yourself to exercise in ways that feel bad, you’ll likely choose not to move at all.
Negotiation Strategy #9 is to learn the links between being physically active and the rest of your day. Identify the links between not moving and moving and how you feel. Notice how your choices influence your physical and mental states and how that further influences what matters most.
Negotiation Strategy #10 is to evaluate and recalibrate with compassion and non-judgment. Reviewing your week this way allows you to celebrate your successes and become more mindful of what gets in your way so you can become skilled in preventing and overcoming these challenges.
Epilogue
Your beliefs become your thoughts,
Your thoughts become your words,
Your words become your actions,
Your actions become your habits,
Your habits become your values,
Your values become your destiny.
—MAHATMA GANDHI”
About the Author
Michelle Segar is a behavioral sustainability and motivation scientist and Director of the University of Michigan’s Sport, Health, and Activity Research and Policy (SHARP) Center.
She also chairs the U.S. National Physical Activity Plan’s Communications Committee, advising the Plan on new strategies for the American public and policy makers.
Her comprehensive training includes a Ph.D. in Psychology and master’s degrees in Health Behavior/Health Education (MPH) and Kinesiology (MS) from the University of Michigan.