I write and talk a lot about how making small, incremental changes work, and I wanted to share some rather surprising insights I noticed just today about that very thing.

I recently started showing my son Alex a video designed to teach him basic words in a really cool way. The first video in this program lasts maybe 13 minutes, and you’re supposed to show it to your child twice a day. Well, I’m a rebel and have shown it to him a grand total of 4 times in 6 days due to miscellaneous life complications that make our weekends not about teaching my son how to read. So I haven’t been 100% perfect in following instructions, but as said, I have shown my son this video several times.

Even without having been exposed “perfectly,” within a couple times of interacting with this cool video, Alex started saying the word “elephant” every time he, well, saw an elephant. And he began to clap his hands when he saw the word “clap.” Within the last couple days, he now appears to know the difference between a tiger and a cat, and there are a number of additional words (not just animal-related!) that he’s also picked up.

Now, we all know kids are little sponges, and this video series is designed to teach very young kids (my son is 15 months old) and seems to be good for what it’s sold to do.

But I see a difference in my son each time he watches the video with me. Little changes, but they’re there. Incremental progress.

Likewise, I’m working on getting back into shape after a hiatus from working out due to that pesky back injury right before New Year’s. If I were to jump in and do an intense high-impact workout on day 1, I’d have sore knees (and sore everything else), and I’d be out of commission for at least a couple weeks till the knee pain goes away. I have to move back into working out by easing in, and I’m doing so right now.

In fact, I’ve been doing so for a little over 2 weeks now, and I’m seeing a change in my energy level throughout the day, my strength and my endurance during the workouts. I started small with a light workout and have worked up to much higher intensity, though nowhere near my previous level. (Bear in mind that I wasn’t in awful shape before I fell, and our muscles have an innate memory that allows them to jump back into old activities.) But the changes I’m seeing are small and steady, not huge leaps, and yet I know that if I continue on, in another month or two I will be back to the happier, fitter me who can do the high-intensity workouts I love (and my butt will look better to boot *lol*).

And I’ve found that it’s easier to ease in because my brain doesn’t rebel after 3 days and say,”Hey, this isn’t working. Try yet another idea [even though I haven't followed through on the first one yet].”

What’s the lesson in all this?

You can’t get there overnight.

You can’t get to perfect health overnight. You can’t get fit overnight. You can’t change your entire set of eating habits overnight.

But you CAN change your lifestyle in small, simple steps by making incremental progress. It isn’t sexy :) but it works! I’m living proof.

Here are 5 surprising reasons why you should consider baby-stepping your way to healthy eating:

1) If you’ve not been successful in the past, it’s time to start being realistic about what you can accomplish, and baby-stepping is very, very often the answer. So often, we want instant gratification. If you try to do a sweeping change in your eating overnight and it doesn’t work, we often tell ourselves that it’s the diet’s fault when we lapse after 3 days and go back to our old way of eating. But that’s dead wrong! It’s just that you’ve been unrealistic in the amount of change you can successfully make in a relatively short period of time.

It takes a monumental shift in perspective to make an overnight complete change in your lifestyle. In fact, the only truly monumental shifts I’ve ever made personally within a matter of days have been due to illness, finding out I was pregnant and … I’m drawing a blank otherwise! (And mind you, I have changed many, many things in my life to improve my health and overall sense of satisfaction with life!) If you want to change how you eat, you can do so, but it is simpler and more painless to ease in over a period of time. (Dr. Fuhrman’s Eat for Health set is a great tool for helping you ease into healthier eating without having to change overnight.)

So what would you like to tackle? Want to make a total change in how you eat between now and summer? If you started out by changing, say, what you eat for breakfast or eliminating one group of unhealthy foods from your diet and phase in additional smaller changes along the way, within weeks you’ll be near or at your goal of eating well most or even all the time!

2) Keep in mind that even if you go astray, there’s no “Food Police” that’s going to get you! (In other words, relax!) The whole point of easing into healthful eating is that it’s OK to make mistakes here and there, that it’s fine if you don’t eat perfectly from day 1. (And if you read this blog often, you’ll know my thoughts on perfection! There’s no such thing!) That lets you off the hook and stops the self-blame cycle that often sends us running for the junk food. Easing in allows room for mistakes, while moving the overall trend of your eating to more healthful ways!

3) Rest assured that it’s not a sign of weakness if you can’t “do it right” from the beginning. If this stuff was easy, just about everyone would be fit, thin and healthy! Most of us grew up eating poorly or eating too much (or both), and it’s taken us each a whole lifetime to get to this point where we recognize the time for change. But since it’s taken a whole lifetime, you can’t expect to undo these mental patterns overnight that keep you from eating healthy sometimes. Our minds are stubborn (mine especially), so it takes time and patience to learn, grow and become the health-minded folks we want to be.

You might meet the occasional person who can plunge right in to anything new without restraint, but those are rare birds. And likely they’ve practiced change in their lives often enough that change itself is a habit. Which brings me to …

4) If you want to change, you need to exercise your “Change Muscle.” No, there’s no such body part in reality, but the fact is that the more we practice something, the easier it becomes to do it again and again. What this means is that if you’ve been stuck in a rut for a long time, feel unhappy about your body or life or health, etc. and haven’t made any changes in ages, you’re in a pattern of No-Change. The No-Change pattern is actually a habit ingrained in your brain! And since the message your brain keeps sending out to you is “Whatever you do, don’t change because I don’t want to expend the energy to deal with the new stuff,” you become more and more resistant to change over time.

That’s where easing in kicks in — it allows you to trick your mind into thinking you’re still mostly in No-Change mode, while at the same time insidiously :) making little changes in your eating pattern, lifestyle, etc. But your Change Muscle still feels basically safe and unscathed and lets you get on with your life. (And pardon the silly verbiage here — it illustrates my point, doesn’t it?) I like to think of that inner voice as a protective feature that tries to keep us from doing things that are unsafe, but unfortunately, the more closed-down it gets toward change, the less helpful it is. But we can each teach ourselves that it’s possible to be safe *and* change too! And that makes it easier to plunge into healthy eating, working out, you name it.

5) Whether you start a new way of eating strictly or ease in, there are still going to be kinks, but easing in makes it easier. Know now, in advance, that there will be some ups and downs along the way that may make you anxious, and that this will get better (and better and better and better …) as time passes. That’s right. Not every day will be full of sunshine. Some old feelings you’ve had bottled up might come out. You might occasionally feel uncomfortable. You might not enjoy every new meal you prepare that’s healthy as you start figuring out what you do, in fact, love (that happens to be healthy).

But as time passes, you grow and change, and you will experience more joy and satisfaction from making these lifestyle changes that get you healthy, thin and glowing.

And in fact, if you make small changes on a regular basis in your diet and lifestyle, you will find that you can actually grow far more quickly than you otherwise could. After all, there’s little risk of burnout, plenty of times along the way to look back and feel happy about what you’ve accomplished, only rare instances of rebellion because you’re not changing too “hard and fast” for your mind to keep up with … In other words, small changes add up to big ones. And these little changes help you make bigger ones that don’t feel nearly as scary as giving up your breakfast fast food (or Frosted Flakes or whatever!). It actually gets easier to succeed the more you practice at it! If you’ve been hesitating or struggling with how to go about starting to eat healthfully, maybe now’s the time to consider easing in.

What do you think? Have you ever tried this approach before with anything else in life? Do you have any questions? Still skeptical? Think you’re too impatient to make this happen? Let me know your thoughts!