Lesson 17: Addictions and Unhealthy Habits

Many attempts have been made to help people out of their addictions and unhealthy habits. Results have most of the time been deceiving.

Healfi does not claim to have a perfect answer, but proposes an innovative way of coming up with solutions:

• first of all, Healfi goes to the root of the problem and analyses the problem based on deeper knowledge
• second, Healfi involves the readers and Healfi groups to brainstorm until the day we together come up with a great solution.

As websites like First 30 Days and StickK suggest, it is supposed to be very difficult to change to new positive habits.

Healfi sees this differently: we believe that getting rid of addictions and unhealthy habits is easy when you have understood how health works and how your ego operates.

And as more and more people become aware of this knowledge, they will be able to help each other and change will become really FUN.

The maths are quite simple: you are out-of-balance and try to compensate it by one or many addictions. You just need to take the required measures to get back to balance. Then you will not have to struggle to get rid of your addictions.

Healfi's way of seeing things is that all addictions and unhealthy habits can be tackled with the same method, so let us just take two common examples, then you could proceed in a similar way for other issues:

Overeating

An absolutely obvious FACT if you have a "beer belly" or a fat ass (hey there Mr./Mrs. Ego, how do you feel? No carpet around?) is that you eat and/or drink too much and unhealthy, and that you do not move enough to burn these calories.

So far, so good. Nothing new here. We are not going to insult you over again by telling you that you should eat a balanced diet of 22.74% proteins, 41.697% carbohydrates and 35.563% fat and that you need to burn at least 2549.697401345 calories per day if it is not raining. You already know that.

Now comes the 50 million dollar question: WHY is it in practice so extremely difficult to get rid of these bad habits, when in theory the solution is that you just need to eat less (and healthier) and move a little more?

The main reason for this is that most of the time people do not tackle or remove the underlying causes that made them get into these bad habits in the first place.

As you have understood from the previous lessons of this course, the causes for overeating (or any other health issue) could be different from one person to the next, and healfi.com gives you the first structured tool available to find these causes.

Furthermore, your sweet little enemy does not like when you try to change things and will do ANYTHING in its power to distract you from your goals and put sticks in your wheels to make every attempted change a nightmare for you.

Most people are trying to swim across the English Channel with one hand tied behind their back. Feasible, but no wonder most people give up and do not reach their goal.

Healfi's aim is to help you find the Eurotunnel.

What could be the real causes of overeating?

- maybe frustration from negative relationships?
- maybe a missing goal in life?

Only you can know what the real cause(s) could be.

Smoking

Smoking is mostly a lack of knowledge of how the ego operates: Why did you start smoking? In most cases it was your ego that tricked you into telling you that you are so much cooler and superior to others because you dare to smoke.

In this case, your nasty little friend won a battle, making the real you weaker, which is why so many people do not have the "strength" to beat the ego in up-coming matches.

As you grow older and (hopefully) wiser, you suddenly discover that smoking is not so cool any longer, so it should be very easy to give up? No, no, no. Your ego is working full time to convince you that:

• it is so hard to stop smoking, hardly anybody makes it
• you need the cigarettes to stress less
• just one more will not hurt you
• you can still look cool like James Dean
• you do not have enough character to stop smoking
• you will not be able to stop until...

But do not worry about the beast for the moment. Just go through healfi.com to find out what parts of your life are out of balance and might be the real cause for your smoking (to compensate a lack somewhere else).

Now that you have:

1. Identified and understood how your enemy (your ego) operates
2. Identified the obstacles (unresolved real causes for your smoking)

...you are ready to draft your "battle plan":

Your battle plan needs to include actions that:

1. Weakens your ego
2. Removes the obstacles.

To weaken your ego, we suggest that you identify baby-steps that you can take. Let us call them "mini-battles". These are small battles you know that you can win. In themselves, they will not make you win the war, but they will make you stronger - and the Devil weaker.

If this was a video game, your aim would be to gain as many small points as possible, so that you can receive a bigger gun later on, once you have reached enough points.

In real life, this "bigger gun" comes in form of increased self-confidence, more willpower, deeper health knowledge, etc.

Here are some examples of "mini-battles" you can easily win:

• clear your clutter on your desk
• refrain from buying something you do not really need
• take the stairs instead of the elevator
• start to recycle
• drink two more glasses of water than you usually do
• go home one hour earlier from work once or twice a week

The Devil is in the details.
~ English idiom.

Parallel to all the mini-battles you fight to weaken your ego, you need to build your own strategy on how you can remove the obstacles that are the true causes of your disease or addiction.

This is a personal creative process and the strategy you will adopt is unique to your situation.

You might need to adapt your battle plan along the way, but that is OK, now you have plenty of "ammunition" to win the big battle and fire your ego.

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