Healthy Habits Suck ― How to Get Off the Couch and Live a Healthy Life?Even If You Don't Want to

Salad instead of steak? Working out? Skipping that second beer or glass of wine? Healthy habits are THE WORST.

If you’re someone who gets up every morning and can’t wait for your run, considers eating sweet potatoes a splurge, and sets aside thirty minutes before work to meditate—this book isn’t for you. If you’re someone who thinks about getting up to go for a run but goes back to sleep, regrets last night’s dinner of fast food, and can barely get to work on time—let alone meditate—then this book will help you find the motivation you’ve been looking for to live your healthiest life, even when you don’t want to.

With this funny, in-your-face guide, you won’t find advice on how to “enjoy” exercise, or tips for making broccoli and kale taste as good as donuts and ice cream. What you will find are solid skills to help you actually do the healthy things you know you should be doing. Using these skills—based in acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) and neuroscience—you’ll learn to find the motivation you’re really craving to adopt healthy habits, even if they do suck. You’ll also discover how to accept self-criticism, develop self-compassion, and live a more meaningful life.

This book not only acknowledges that many healthy habits suck, it uses science to explain why we want the things we want (junk food), crave the things we crave (sugar), and dislike the things we dislike (exercise). At the end, you’ll feel validated in feeling like these things are the absolute worst. But you’ll also find the motivation to do them anyway.

Dayna Lee-Baggley, PhD, exercises regularly and rarely enjoys it. She is a regular runner who competes in 10K races and never gets a runner's high. She drinks green smoothies and hates vegetables. Every time her kid asks her to go do some physical activity (biking, swimming, etc.) she thinks “crap, I don’t want to do that” and she does it anyway.

Dayna is also a health psychologist and registered clinical psychologist. She holds positions as a clinical health psychologist at the Nova Scotia Health Authority for the Multi Organ Transplant Program; as core faculty member of the Behavior Change Institute, which trains healthcare providers in behavior change skills for chronic disease management; and was lead psychologist for Partners for Healthier Weight, an obesity management clinic. She is president of the Atlantic Chapter of the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science (ACBS) and vice chair of the Halifax Chapter of the Canadian Obesity Network. Her areas of expertise include facilitating health behavior change, managing and treating obesity, adapting to chronic health conditions, and professional resiliency/burnout prevention in health care providers.