Mastering Habit Stacking: Elevate Your Weight Loss and Fitness Goals for Women Over 40

Women over 40:  Discover how Habit Stacking can uplevel your weight loss and fitness efforts.

I work mainly with women over 40.  ALL of my clients are busy women juggling multiple responsibilities while having 389 tabs open in their brains all the time AND they are not getting the results that they want in relation to their weight, health and fitness.  That’s why they reach out to me and why they love my 12 weeks to WOW program – because it contains ALL of the things that they need to get the results they want.

One of the cornerstones of my programs is dealing with the Psychology of eating and habit change.  We talk right from the outset about getting to know ourselves better and understanding how and why we behave and respond to things in the way we do.  I am passionate about creating a judgement free environment (which is entirely women judging themselves) because that never changed anyone.  This is a bad hangover from our 20’s and 30’s – the diet and overexercise culture and self flagellation of not being able to get our bodies to look a certain way, to lose weight and finding ourselves on that diet roundabout FOREVER.  We are waaaay too old to still be talking to ourselves like that AND guess what?  That self talk is making it harder for you to lose weight and keep it off.  You are self sabotaging.  We deal with this in my program too – it’s all part of long-term sustainable weight loss.  If you only tackle the food then at some point the rubbish still contained in our minds has the potential to take us off course.  But that’s for another conversation.

Today, I want to talk habit stacking.  Yes we deal with the underlying stuff too but there are still many practical elements that we need to address to get AMAZING results.  Habit stacking is a concept that I’ve been talking about for years using my own language but I saw more formalised in the fabulous book (that I highly recommend) Atomic Habits by James Clear.  

Building New Habits by taking advantage of existing ones

As we age, our brain prunes away connections between neurons (synapses) that don’t get used and builds up connections that get used often.  For example, if you play a musical instrument, your brain with strengthen those connections and they become faster and more efficient.  Someone that does not play music will have those unused connections pruned away and the brain will direct the energy toward building connections for other skills.

Habit Stacking

Your brain will build a strong network of neurons to support your current habits and behaviours. The more you do something, the stronger and more efficient the connection becomes.

We all have very strong habits and connections that you take for granted each day. For example, I don’t have to think about making my morning coffee or cleaning my teeth.  We have hundreds of habits just like this.