Michelle Segar

The Joy Choice throws out the typical self-defeating, rigid requirements of past diets or workout regimens and puts you in the driver's seat of your own decision-making, giving you the strategies to resolve the conflicts that your eating and exercise plans inevitably face. Why do we so easily fall off the diet wagon, or fail to maintain an exercise routine, even when we really want to? Based on cutting-edge decision science and engaging stories from her work with coaching clients and industry, Dr. Michelle Segar, director of University of Michigan's Sport, Health, and Activity Research and Policy Center and lifestyle change coach of almost 30 years, explains the surprising reasons that habits created for eating and exercise so often crash when they come up against real life. Segar offers a fresh and playful framework for navigating the momentary decisions and conflicts we face daily about what to eat and how to get our exercise and still meet work, family, and other life needs. Through her simple but powerful three-step decision-making tool POP!--Pause, Open, Play! -- Segar shows you how to easily sort through your options and make the decision that keeps you moving toward your goals, powering you to feel your best and serve the people and things that matter most.

How to Finally Achieve Lasting Changes in Eating and Exercise

The Joy Choice

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As with so many other behavior-change targets, when we aim for what we’ve been told and it doesn’t hold, we are left feeling like a failure, again.

Yet, when we try to make these “sensible” changes, many of us encounter a feeling of internal pressure and obligation. These forces are often unconscious but they still exert pressure, so it’s no wonder that conflict kicks in.

But the fact is, many, if not most of us, have a great deal of psychological conflict wrapped up with dietary change and exercise, and habits can’t make this conflict disappear.

Importantly, there are theories about, and research showing, that these types of inner conflicts will almost inevitably spoil our best intentions.

Inner conflicts about trying to change our diet or exercise, whether conscious or not, put us at odds with our core self and lead us to sabotage rather than support sustainable behavior change. 

Yet the common belief that we should be able to do this, and that habits will take us there, means that we rarely address these fundamental issues when we try to form a habit.

The bottom line? Habit formation demands a reliably stable context that makes our choices frictionless and depends on positive experiences. The turmoil created by inner conflict is anything but.

In lives that present us with the continual need to improvise and negotiate, mounting science shows, paradoxically, that we need to be flexible (not rigid) if we hope to become consistent with exercise and healthy eating.

This common phenomenon is referred to as the 

 between our intentions and behavior. We keep intending and starting, and then we quickly fall down, whether through temptation, rebelling against our own plans, or simply being too tired or confused about which choices to choose.

This gap is not a reflection of our personal failings.

No time to work out for forty minutes? No workout today. Can’t do it right? Don’t do it at all. Mounting science shows that this pervasive perfectionistic thinking gets in the way of coming up with creative strategies that could have taken us to our goal. Because most things in life can’t be perfect, unrealistic expectations leave us feeling as though we failed, ultimately demotivating us from doing anything at all.

But the Temptation decision disruptor is all about immediate pleasure. It doesn’t 

 about our future goals. That’s one reason why it’s so easy for Temptation to win at the point of choice between sticking with long-term goals or feeling happy 

Temptation is the desire to do something, whether it’s something we just want, or something that might be considered unwise or forbidden. In its very essence, temptation is (consciously or unconsciously) 

Because this gut feeling is the result of our past exercise experiences, it arises spontaneously at the moment of choice. And because it is from the reactive system, it’s automatic: we can’t control its arising.

So, why do we rebel, seemingly, against ourselves?

Because it is an innate human response to feel rebellious defiance toward feeling pressured or dominated. Formally called 

, Rebellion refers to the drive we experience to reclaim our freedom when we feel that we are being controlled.

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