Choosing and Losing

To make a meaningful healthful lifestyle change, one chooses to enact some new behavior or behaviors.  On the face of it, that seems simple enough.  To make such a change, a person rationally would deliberate about what, when, and how to do that which would make her/him healthier.  The process might involve identifying a missing health-promoting practice and adding it.  Everything to gain and nothing to lose, right? 

That, of course is wrong.  Every meaningful choice presumes a significant loss.  If there were nothing to lose, everyone effortlessly would implement every healthful behavior as soon as it is found to be healthful.  And today especially, we readily are told what is “good” and “bad” for us.  In fact, commercial and social media barrage us with all kinds of facts and figures advocating the best health practices.  In a past blog, I have discussed information overload, so let’s limit ourselves today to that which we gain, and that which we lose when we make a significant behavior change that impacts our health substantially.

First, consider the obvious fact that we create a lifestyle over time.  Therefore, lifestyle behaviors have been reinforced and habitual.  They mostly are automatic.  We don’t think about them.  Second, many of the automatic lifestyle behaviors are triggered by cues totally outside our selves.  For instance, if you walk past a concession stand on your way to work, you might grab a donut and cup of coffee merely because you and they are there at a convenient time.  Third, the automatic behaviors satisfy a need, regardless of whether you are aware of the need or not.  Although we could continue to enumerate the many reasons for our current lifestyle habits, the point has been made that unconscious habits are a major element.

That brings us to the issue of losses.  By definition, whenever we make a meaningful decision, we are choosing something and not choosing something.   Not choosing means that we are “losing” whatever is not chosen.  New choices also are likely to require us deliberately to forgo something to which we had been accustomed, such as deciding to discontinue purchasing the donut that usually accompanied our coffee.  When we are aware of the loss involved in a healthful decision, we can steel our self against the loss, and successfully mourn it.  But when we do not realize that the healthful decision presumes a loss, we are vulnerable to a host of factors that militate against maintaining the healthful choice.  Some of the factors render us unable to implement the new healthful behavior for more than a brief period, and some make us discontinue the behavior later after it only seemed to have become a “good habit.”

Whenever you contemplate or begin to implement a healthful change then, be aware that you are making a decision with one, two, or more major implications:  You will lose out on whatever is included in all the other alternatives that you did not select; you will have to discontinue any existing behaviors that conflict with the new one; or some combination of losing opportunities and/or of discontinuing existing behaviors.  There will be a loss of some kind, so be ready for it.