Harris Russ - Healthy habits suck: how to get off the couch & live a healthy life ... even if you dont want to

Healthy Habits Suck is the right companion on a journey toward eating, sleeping, and living well. This book is solidly grounded in research and years of practical experience bringing a refreshing what works attitude. You will find accessible activities, compelling descriptions, and profoundly relatable insights into living a healthier life. If youre struggling to make healthy lifestyle changes, try this radically new approach to living well.

Timothy Gordon, MSW, RSW , award-winning coauthor of The ACT Approach and Mindful Yoga-Based Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

So many of us fail again and again to keep up the healthy eating or exercise goals we set for ourselves. In this readable, realistic, and honest book, Lee-Baggley combines cutting-edge behavioral science, professional (and personal) experience, and usable techniques to show us how we can make the changes that matter to us, and make them stick. I think this book will help many of my clients: I KNOW it will help me!

Ray Owen, DClinPsychol , consultant clinical and health psychologist (National Health Service, England), and author of Living with the Enemy

Healthy Habits Suck is a breath of fresh air and a much-needed compassionate perspective on the difficulties of making lifestyle changes. Lee-Baggley writes with the perfect blend of easy-to-understand science, illustrative clinical examples, and personal experience to help the reader change their perspective on what it means to be healthy, and the best ways to pursue health goals.

Jason Lillis, PhD , coauthor of The Diet Trap , and assistant professor at the Brown University Medical School

The central premise of this book is that most health behaviors go against our natural instincts (apple pie will always taste better than apples). So, how do you get yourself to do them? Here, Lee-Baggley provides a key insight: rather than linking health behaviors to specific goals like losing weight, sustained change happens when we link these behaviors to a deeply felt value like maintaining my independence. The book is an easy read, with real-life case studies and strategies on how to approach decision points and engage in mindfulness and self-compassion. A good read for anyone seeking to change their behaviors.

Arya M. Sharma, MD , professor of medicine at the University of Alberta, Edmonton; and founder of Obesity Canada

Healthy Habits Suck is a laugh-out-loud introduction to the passengers on your bus who hijack your efforts to pursue healthy habits. How do we live with our caveman brains instincts in the modern world? Lee-Baggley has a goal: to help you live a more meaningful, purposeful, and vibrant life through emotion-focused coping strategies to manage your health behaviorseven when you dont want to.

Denise Campbell-Scherer, MD, PhD , professor in the department of family medicine, and associate dean of the lifelong learning and physician learning program at the University of Alberta, Edmonton

This is one of the most useful and important books I have read for some time. The skills you will learn from this book are based on the latest theories and research in the fields of psychology, health, and behavior change. The book will be especially useful to anyone interested in becoming more active, eating better, (re)engaging with a hobby, or improving their health in other ways. But I would also recommend this book if youd like to become clearer about your personal values, or if you want to learn how to find more meaning and purpose in your daily life.

Paul Flaxman, PhD , reader in the department of psychology at City, University of London; and coauthor of The Mindful and Effective Employee

Lee-Baggley helps us appreciate our very human affinity for adopting and practicing poor health habits, year after year. Then, she provides practical strategies for humans to use to choose behaviors that promote health, one moment at a time. This little book helped me take on a small, important, and difficult change in my life because I want to live and love and be of service to others as long as I can. Thank you, Dayna Lee-Baggley, for sharing your stories and your wisdom with us!

Patricia Robinson, PhD , coauthor of The Mindfulness and Acceptance Workbook for Depression

Publishers Note

This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering psychological, financial, legal, or other professional services. If expert assistance or counseling is needed, the services of a competent professional should be sought.

Distributed in Canada by Raincoast Books

Copyright 2019 by Dayna Lee-Baggley

New Harbinger Publications, Inc.

5674 Shattuck Avenue

Oakland, CA 94609

www.newharbinger.com

Cover design by Sara Christian

Acquired by Elizabeth Hollis-Hansen

Edited by James Lainsbury

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file

To all my clients who have given me the honor of sharing their journey with me. Your resiliency inspires me every day.

Contents

Foreword

Why is it so incredibly difficult to be healthy?

Why do so many people struggle to initiate healthy behaviors that they know will make them happy?

Why do most common-sense approaches to health and wellness usually fail in the long term?

And what can we do differently to help ourselves build the sorts of lives we can truly and deeply appreciateincluding but not limited to being physically and emotionally healthy?

These are a few of the key questions that Dayna Lee-Baggley explores and answers within this book using a science-based approach called ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy). The ACT model offers a powerful set of realistic, practical, and evidence-based strategies to help you develop the kinds of healthy habits and behaviors that are the foundation of a purposeful and fulfilling lifeall while effectively handling the pain that inevitably goes with it.

Hang on a moment: did I just suggest that pain is inevitable? Yes, I sure did. The inconvenient truth is that life is both wonderful and terrible. If we live long enough, we will experience both happiness and heartbreak, success and failure, love and loss, bliss and despair, health and illness, joy and regret. These opposites are a package deal, just like no one gets a free ride or a smooth journey. The fact is, life is difficult, and it serves up pain and suffering for us all.

But heyits not all bad! Fortunately for us, the ACT model gives us a way forwards in the face of lifes many hardships. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy gets its name because of a key theme: it teaches us how to reduce the impact and influence of painful thoughts and feelings (acceptance), while simultaneously taking action to build a life worth living (commitment). And in the pages that follow, Dayna Lee-Baggley will show you, step-by-step, how to do this in the realm of health behaviors. Where you go from there is ultimately up to you.

Enjoy the journey; you are in good hands.

Russ Harris, author of The Happiness Trap

Introduction:
Healthy Habits Suck

If you google how to be healthy, youll find a whole bunch of websites offering easy and fast tricks. But guess what? They lie. Being healthy is hard. Its so hard that most of us are not healthy. The majority of North Americans eat too much processed food, dont sleep enough, drink too much, and are overweight. In fact, if you are a normal weight, youre actually abnormalthat is, youre in the minority, because most of us now live with overweight or obesity.