Reverse Engineer Your Health
Visualize with me for a moment.
You are 6–12 months in the future. There is nothing holding you back. You are the perfect picture of health. What does that look like? How much do you weigh? What does your body look like? What goes into your healthy lifestyle? How does it feel?
Do you have this picture in your mind? Keep it there.
We always need to be looking ahead when it comes to our health. We should always be striving to be healthier. Every action that we take should be taking us to that vision in our head. This is called reverse engineering our health. If we constantly keep this end goal in mind we can hold ourselves accountable for our day to day actions and habits.
The only problem is, most people just stop here.
They have a goal, see what it looks like, but don’t finish reverse engineering it to their current self. What habits will I need to implement? How consistently should I workout? What should my diet look like?
When I reached my heaviest at over 200lbs, I had the goal of reaching my college weight of 175lbs. I wanted to do this within the span of 5 months. I knew I had to start making my own food so I vowed to prepare 80% of my meals. I had to workout 5 days a week and make them more high intensity. I knew down to the week how much weight I had to lose to reach my goal. I tracked my food, my workouts, and my daily weight to make sure I was staying the course with my weekly goals. I reverse engineered the process from finish to start.
From finish to start? I thought it was the other way around?
I have found that most people plan from start to finish. This sounds like the most logical way to start a transformation. You read a book from beginning to end right? It is exciting and fresh! You end up overhauling your life and doing great for a couple weeks. Then it inevitably gets harder and harder to maintain. Old habits grab hold of you and pull you back into the lifestyle you so desperately tried to run from. Planning from start to finish creates a false sense of hope and introduces you to the planning fallacy.
Most people grossly underestimate the amount of time it will take to reach a goal. The planning fallacy “is a phenomenon in which predictions about how much time will be needed to complete a future task display an optimism bias (underestimate the time needed)”. This psychological factor influences the time we believe it might take to reach our ideal health. We calculate timing based on the best possible outcome, we incorporate wishful thinking and we have no gauge as to how long the task should actually take. When we reverse engineer we need to make room for error and time, start by doubling or tripling the time you initially think it should take to reach your goal.
Reverse engineering your health makes you get REAL.
You can see, feel, and experience what your perfect picture of health embodies. As you move towards the future in your reverse engineering you will inevitably see the hardships, the hurdles, and the setbacks that you may encounter along the way. You are emotionally prepared for these fights as they become real. You can experience the wall that you will hit after the honeymoon phase of a health transformation is over. And guess what? You can plan against these moments! Have a counter attack for hitting the wall, have an alternative snack to that bag of chips; plan around your potential vices. Using this practice to map out your healthy journey will alert you to your potential blind spots and prepare you for the tough road ahead.
Think you’re ready to reverse engineer your health?
- Visualize your perfect picture of health.
- What habits will you need to lose or implement?
- Protect yourself from your vices, get REAL.
- Plan from finish to start, always keeping the end in mind.
This post originally appeared over at Project Avocado
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