PHOENIX — You've heard the saying, "change is good." That's certainly true for celebrity trainer Chris Powell, who is used to motivating millions of people in the past 20 years.
Powell believes if you change your environment, it can help you achieve your fitness goals.
"So the concept here is how can we recreate ourselves in our homes and in our current daily regimen?" said Powell.
Here are three easy ways Powell said we can change our lifestyle:
Remove trigger foods
This is when we go into the kitchen and target the pantry to remove trigger foods. Powell explains, "It really depends on the individual.
For some people, those trigger foods are going to be sweets, like chocolates and candies.
For other people, it’s going to be those chips. All those things you might find yourself blindly binging on when you are watching TV and not even really enjoying them.
So, it's not that you can’t ever have them, but when you are first starting the journey, get them out of the house so that they will not tempt you in the first place."
Create a new environment
Powell said, "A new environment could be our immediate environment, it could be the drive to work, whatever it is that will help us anchor in this new identity that we're taking on as we're starting to adopt these new habits. And so you could rearrange your living room furniture, you can take a different drive to work, you can paint a wall in your house, but whatever it is, it's something that's different that forces us to be mindful of this new person that we're becoming [and] have these habits that we're trying to adopt."
Set rules for actions you want to stop
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This means making it harder for yourself to indulge.
For example, Powell explains, "Instead of going through the drive-thru, if you want to eat at the fast food restaurant, you can't go through the drive-thru, but you have to go in and consume your food. And what happens is it forces mindfulness. It forces you to be aware of the fact or it's not that you can't eat pizza. But if you're ever going to eat pizza, you can only eat pizza with friends. Don't eat pizza alone. If pizza is a trigger for you, if the drive-thru [is], you identify your triggers, and place little rules around them, where it's not that you remove them, right? Simply play mindful rules around them, and suddenly, it puts you in a lot more control."
Powell believes the most significant takeaway in your quest for being fit for life is to be mindful of every decision you make. "The journey of transformation is really the journey about discovering yourself, identifying who you are, what those triggers are, and learning how to be mindful around our actions. Because the thing is, we all have the power within to transform. But the more we can discover ourselves in the process, the more enjoyable the whole journey can be," said Powell.
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