The Greenroom

This blog is from my friend Andy the man that he is referencing is my Father.
I cannot begin to emphasize how much respect and admiration that I have for him...



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.