Cori (00:00):
Welcome to the Redefining Strength Podcast. Everything you need to succeed on your health and fitness journey. Even the stuff you don’t want to hear. You want to make changes and work towards a new goal. Well, guess what? You’ve got to budget and you got to own it. So I want to talk about the habit budget and what I mean by this, because I think the more we recognize that we have a budget and think of making habit changes in this way, the more we can really meet ourselves where we’re at to constantly evolve and see progress happen faster. Even if it sometimes means slowing down with the habit changes. So if we’re thinking about us having this budget, we have a certain amount in our savings that we can spend to create new habits, and we do things that both add to our savings because they’re restorative, they feel good.

(00:47):
Seeing progress even towards your goals can add to your savings because you want to do more. And then we have all the different habits that we have to implement. The harder the habit, the more the habit will cost us. So if you think about some of the habit changes you’re looking to make, maybe there’s some that you break down and you’re like, oh, I can do this today. I can do this right now. I can go drink some more water right this second. That’s like a penny, right? But you’re like, oh, tracking my food, that sounds miserable, horrible, disgusting, don’t want to do it. That’s like a million dollars. Okay, maybe that’s out of your budget right now. You’re like, I only have 500,000. Okay, I can’t spend that. So what’s one habit within that that you could spend? So you need to think, okay, so if I can’t track, that sounds really horrible.

(01:26):
Well, I can at least write down what I’m eating on a piece of paper, even if I’m not weighing and measuring everything, I’m not fully tracking. That sounds doable. Or hey, I can really focus on protein at each meal and make sure I have a protein source that seems doable, that’s within my budget. So when we start to think about the habit changes and the cost to us, we can start to realize why we don’t make certain ones because they’re outside of what we can actually spend on them. And so when we make these habit changes, we’ll start to notice that things become easier. They become less of an expense because they become ingrained, and then we end up having more money to spend somewhere else. Now, our budget can change over time because we could start putting less into savings because maybe life gets busier.

(02:03):
And so there’s more outside stressors, which are actually costing us and depleting our savings faster because we’re not even putting more in because we’re not taking care of ourselves in the same way. And so when we start to see our savings dwindle, we might recognize even that some of the habits we’re doing that didn’t feel like they were that big an expense become a greater expense because we have less to spend. So maybe doing the meal prep in the way that you have, maybe that hasn’t changed in terms of the hard, but because you’re more stressed at work, you have less time, all of a sudden your budget has really dwindled, your saving has gone down. So that is costing you a lot more. So then you have to reassess, okay, how can I break down my meal prep to fit the budget I have now?

(02:39):
Or even recognize, Hey, because of other stressors, I might still have the same amount technically, and savings is still putting the same amount into the budget, but the expense of that habit has gone up. So what was easy during January to May with tracking all of a sudden now with travel has become that much more expensive for me to do because it’s become that much harder. With traveling, I feel way more frustrated, try to use visual portion guides. This doesn’t work. Or because of the off plant eating, I’m seeing the scale creep up, which is creating more frustration, which is making me not want to do when I get home. So then you have to think, how can I change the pain of that habit or the expense of that habit to be a little bit less and to fit within my budget? Because if it went from a hundred dollars to a thousand dollars, all of a sudden you might be like, well, now I can’t do the other habits because I’m spending too much time on this.

(03:23):
And then it doesn’t feel worth it. So the more we think about really balancing that budget, the better off we’re going to be. And another way to put it, if you want to relate it back to something is the pain of change has to outweigh the pain of stuck or the pain of staying stuck has to outweigh the pain of change. Sorry, reverse that. And when the pain of change starts to outweigh the pain of staying stuck, that’s where we see our expenses go beyond our budget. But we can’t necessarily change the pain of staying stuck unless we put ourselves in a worse situation, which we don’t want to do. So we have to reduce the pain of change. So again, it’s balancing that budget. What are you doing to add to your savings that’s really fills your cup, makes you feel really good? How can you measure progress to even add to that savings in different ways?

(04:04):
Because success leaves us clues. And if we’re only focused on the scale changing and we don’t notice all the other ways it’s adding up, we could feel like our savings is actually dwindling instead of seeing it increase because we don’t realize all the payoff from the habits. And then what is the expense of all the new habits we’re trying to put into play, and how can we break down the expense of some that might be a little too costly at the time? So I really hope this helped you break down how to make habit change and even why you might’ve failed with certain habits in the past because they were a little too costly. Again, the pain of staying stuck has to outweigh the pain of change. And thinking about balancing our budget so that we can really meet ourselves where we’re at with the habits, and even evolve habits over time.

*Note: This transcript is autogenerated there may be some unintended errors.