DAY .:004a

Over the last few years, my pastor made a lot of extreme, awesome changes in his diet, excercise and overall health. I asked him what makes the difference when you're trying to break an old habit or establish a new one. Here's what he had to say:
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Great questions about consistency, staying the course is hard for everybody. In complete candor let me say there are two aspects of what made me consistent. First I had to get to a point where I was completely sick of the direction I was heading; I hit that “enough is an enough” spot. Deep, deep discontent is what gives birth to change. Second I discovered the reward of discipline was indeed sweeter than the reward of indulgence, this I found to be absolutely true. This is what psychologists call “Operant Conditioning”. What that means is when we engage in certain behaviors we get either punished or rewarded. When we are rewarded we tend to repeat that behavior over and over again. The reward factor for me was I started looking less hideous, I started feeling better, people started complimenting me and those positive rewards kept me going. There are rewards for eating a whole chocolate cake – you get the sugar high – followed by the guilt and “why did I do that” record in your head. So the guilt for being undisciplined cancels out the reward for messing up, with the reward of being of disciplined- it is pure reward and it feels better than messing up ultimately. Any indulgence- sleeping in too long and not running give a short reward, doing the hard thing really brings a higher level reward.
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That about sums it up. Awesome.