Habits? But What Happened to Goals?

Recently at BodySpec, we’ve been having a lot of internal conversations about habits.

Many of these discussions have been inspired by the book Atomic Habits by James Clear. And as we collect more stories from our clients, we see many of them arriving at the same realizations.

Goals and willpower are important—but for many people, they’re not enough. The path to long-term success in improving your health is paved not just with goals and desires—but with sustainable, well-established habits.

The truth is that even well-intentioned people who may have the knowledge and desire to change can fail—and fail spectacularly—when their goals aren’t supported by their habits or their environments.

We’ve heard this story a lot in the past year from many of you. Especially against the backdrop of the pandemic, previously-ingrained health habits and routines flew out the window, upended by significant changes to the structure of peoples’ lives.

This has been a personal lesson for us, as BodySpec's co-founders.

I’ve seen this happen personally too. My husband, Roy, who also happens to be BodySpec’s CEO, is obese and pre-diabetic.

As the co-founder of a health company, Roy certainly knows how to eat better, and exercise. And he’s been successful before, having cut his body fat percentage down to the low teens a few years ago.

But recently, as Roy confronted the reality of his deteriorating health, he had to examine why a goal-oriented approach had not been robust enough for the last several years of his life—including having two kids, and weathering the stress of leading a small business through a pandemic.

It wasn’t a lack of goals, nor was it a lack of willpower. But those things crumbled against an accumulation of ingrained bad habits, combined with a home/work environment that made good behavior more difficult.

We’ll be sharing more about Roy’s story in a future post.

What does this mean for BodySpec?

More than ever, we believe that BodySpec is most useful to people when they think of their health in terms of the long game—of not just hitting a short or even medium term goal, but of moving the general trajectory of your health in a more positive direction for good.

BodySpec exists to help people get healthier—and health is not a one-and-done thing. So to fulfill our mission most effectively going forward, we’re going to be thinking and talking more in terms of habits and systems—not just goals.

What we care about above all is results—and we believe that focusing on habits will help more people achieve lasting long-term results.

Our membership program represents the beginning of this approach. The membership program encourages a regular health check-in to keep people in the habit of thinking about their health.

We’re going to continue to make the membership program better, so that building this habit is easy, fun, and rewarding.

If these ideas resonate with you, or if you’ve had similar experiences wrestling with how to maintain change, we want to hear from you—and if you’re interested, we’d love to share your story.