Breaking the Rules of Behavior Change for Success with Michelle Segar

Does it really take 66 days to build a healthy habit? Will there be a time we gain enough self-control or willpower to always eat nutritiously and exercise?

My podcast guest turns everything we thought we knew about healthy behavior change on its head. Not only that, but she also has the research to support it. And a new book.

Michelle Segar, PhD, is an award-winning, NIH-funded researcher at the University of Michigan with almost thirty years studying how to help people adopt healthy behaviors in ways that can survive the complexity and unpredictability of the real world.

Her new book, The Joy Choice: How to Finally Achieve Lasting Changes in Eating and Exercise, helps people make the mindset change they need to build and maintain healthy behaviors.

“The way we’ve been taught to approach dietary change and exercise is you do it right or you don’t do it at all,” she said during our interview. And this sets us up for failure because life always has other plans.

Her process is based on the emerging research on executive function along with decades of research showing what really motivates us to engage in healthy behaviors.

It’s about all those “choice points” and learning to make the perfect, imperfect decision that allows you do something instead of nothing. And most importantly, keep you moving forward instead of feeling defeated.