Use Your Environment To Help Boost Your Health & Fat Loss Success!

You environment can have such a HUGE influence on you!

It can impact your behaviour, your decision making, actions and how you feel day to day and includes people, places, and the physical things surrounding you.

This can be used to your advantage when trying to achieve goals like improved health or to lose body fat BUT it can also work against you if you’re not careful.

So it’s definitely something to look out for and to possibly adjust to boost your chances of success when trying to achieve these things.Let me just start off with a very interesting example of this from a current member of The One Percent Club.

One of our members has a highly stressful job and stress related health condition. But recently, we saw her resting heart rate come down and her HRV go up, both indicating reduced stress in the body. We tried to work out what had caused this and realised the dates correlated to her partner moving in! Her health condition had also started to improve and even though her partner didn't think she was particularly stressed, realised her own resting heart rate had also come down!

Although we can’t prove this is absolutely the case, it would make sense as we know people you spend time with can either ramp up or calm down your nervous system, and loved ones in healthy relationships or a great friend can often do this. A great example of how your environment can directly effect your stress and health due to its impact on nervous system.

Here are 3 more ways your environment can help or hinder your goals.

Your Social Circle - If you spend most of your social time with a group of people who drink heavily, don’t exercise and pay little attention to what they eat, you are far more likely to adopt those behaviours compared to surrounding yourself with people who like to hike at weekends, eat based around health and have the occasional drink out with dinner! There’s a well known saying ‘show me your friends and I’ll show you your future’ which I think rings true with your health and fitness. The more time you spend with people who have similar habits and are health conscious the easier achieving your own goals will be as we tend to get heavily influenced by those around us.

Does this mean you have to ditch all you’re friends who aren’t on the same path as you…No!But the more time you can spend around those who will have a positive influence on you the better. And in my experience, as your habits change you will probably find yourself gravitating towards those people more anyway.

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Physical Objects/Stimuli Around You - An easy example here is food. If I live in a house where there is chocolate out on display and I have to walk past it and decide not to have it 10 times a day, compared to a house that doesn’t have any in it or has it hidden out of sight, can you see straight away how the second house is going to be a lot easier to lose weight in? Decision making such as choosing not to have something takes energy and also an opportunity to make the wrong decision ever time you have to make one. Filling your house with the foods that keep you on track and removing the ones (or making them harder to see) that don’t, is an easy win.

Equally if I leave my gym kit out in the morning ready to go, it acts as a positive stimulus encouraging me to get to the gym.

Surround yourself with the things that set you up to succeed and minimise the things that set you up to fail!

Your Partner/Those You Live With- You spend a lot of time with your partner or those you live with and so their habits will have an effect on you more than most. I’ve coached people who have had supportive partners and un supportive partners when losing weight. Guess who was more successful at hitting their goals?!

If you have a partner who understands what you are trying to do, and is supportive of that goal, then your chances of success will be boosted hugely. And if they also decide to focus on their health and fitness then even better! Imagine both preparing balanced healthy food together in the evening compared to one of you still pushing to order food in…you are far less likely to go off course and makes positive decision making more likely.

I hope that gave you some ideas of how your environment might effect you and things you might sent to adjust slightly.

If you want some more ideas of how to improve this to maximise your chances of success then please listen to this weeks episode of the podcast here.

Have a great week!

Lizzie

The One Percent Club